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F&SF, July/August.

Jesus and the Eightfold Path, Lavie Tidhar. (Immersion Press, 978-0-9563924-3-5. 73 pages.) Cover art by Melissa Gay.

Asimov’s, June.

Asimov’s, July.

 

The July/August F&SF is a strong issue, after a couple of weak ones. The best story here, the best SF story F&SF has published all year, and perhaps the best story of any sort, is Robert Reed’s complex and inventive novella, “The Ants of Flanders.” This is an Alien Invasion story, but a much more imaginative and conceptually daring one than the standard-issue Alien Invasion story like Independence Day or Battle: Los Angeles, with vast and vastly strange cosmic forces battling it out on an Earth they hardly notice, and where humans are no more important to the outcome, or any more able to change it, than the ants caught in the middle of a World War I battlefield referenced in the title. The protagonist is a boy caught up in the battle and bizarrely transformed by accident—although even before his transformation, he is an most unusual boy with a strange psychological mindset, almost already an alien himself in some ways, and the accidental process that totally remakes his body doesn’t really change that mindset, but only deepens his calm logic and detachment. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see this one on award ballots next year.

Also excellent here is Peter S. Beagle’s loving homage to the late Avram Davidson, “The Way It Works Out and All,” which features a closely-observed and affectionately drawn Davidson as one of the protagonists (the other being Beagle himself), and which draws upon the mythology of one of Davidson’s best novels, Masters of the Maze, where all of time and space is connected by strange subspace tunnels that can be blundered into anywhere, even on a New York City street, even in the Men’s Room at Grand Central Station. Great fun. Fans of Steven Saylor’s long series of historical mysteries about the adventures of Gordianus the Finder, who investigates murder and mayhem in Ancient Rome, will be pleased to see Saylor back in the pages of F&SF for the first time since 1986 with “The Witch of Corinth,” a story sending a young Gordianus to the war-ravaged, haunted ruins of Corinth in 92 B.C. to unravel a deadly mystery; the fantastic element here is almost subliminal, but Saylor fans, among which I number myself, will be pleased enough to see a new Gordianus story to excuse that, especially as the story is suspenseful and thick with historical atmosphere and local color. Rob Chilson contributes an autumnal story, “Less Stately Mansions,” about an embattled farmer who struggles to hold on to his farm and keep it in the family as the world changes around him, especially as his presumptive heirs show no interest in taking it over and clearly will sell it as soon as he’s gone—a story that could easily be taking place right now, but which is made science fictional by Chilson’s effective use of a near-future setting.

Nothing else in the issue is of this level of quality, but there is some solid stuff. Richard Bowes takes us inside the enchanted realm where King Arthur sleeps, waiting to wake again, in “Sir Morgravain Speaks of Night Dragons and Other Things,” Michael Alexander tells a competent but somewhat routine time-travel story in “Someone Like You,” and KJ Kabza threads a similar kind of interdimensional maze to the one in the Beagle’s story in “The Ramshead Algorithm,” although the Kabza is occasionally confusing and is hard to really get into until at least a third of the way through. There’s also a posthumous story by Joan Aiken, “Hair,” which is creepy but has an even more subliminal fantastic element than some of the other stories here with subliminal fantastic elements.

Lavie Tidhar is one of the most interesting new writers to enter the genre in some time, and his chapbook novella “Jesus and the Eightfold Path” is another major work by him, although even harder to pin down by genre than is his usual work. A vivid and gonzo reimagining of the life of Jesus, it’s less sacrilegious and more respectful than you would think a story whose working title was “Kung Fu Jesus” would be, although Jesus does indeed get to use his martial arts skills, learned under the tutelage of the Eastern Masters who taught him to follow the Eightfold Path, to beat up the moneylenders as he casts them from the Temple, defeat some attacking mummies, and so forth. Although all this would probably have been enough to get Tidhar burnt at the stake during the Middle Ages, he actually treats Jesus with a fair degree of reverence, as a man who really has been touched by the Divine (although what Divine remains open to question) and possesses immense preternatural abilities. Much of the gonzo humor, and much of the entertainment value, is carried by the Three Wise Men, here reimagined as former kings, wizards, and minor gods impressed into service by a superior supernatural force, and called Sandy, Monkey, and Pigsy; they get many of the best lines. There’s also a supporting role for the slippery Jewish historian, Josephus Flavius. Perhaps what this reminds me the most of is the movie Big Trouble in Little China, if the filmmakers had decided to tackle the Gospels as well as Chinese mythology. Although some of the more pious may be offended, most readers will probably find this hugely entertaining.

Asimov’s has been having a good year so far, and the June Asimov’s is another strong issue. The best stories here, although very different in tone, are both fundamentally similar in premise, both being stories about the persistence of identity and what really makes a human a human, beyond the mere physical hardware. Ian R. MacLeod’s “The Cold Step Beyond” takes us to a far, far future where, in Arthur C. Clarke’s famous phrase, the technology is so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, for an SF story that reads like High Fantasy, a rather melancholy study of a bioengineered warrior sent to fight a monster who ultimately turns out to be not at all what she expected it to be. Mary Robinette Kowal’s novella “Kiss Me Twice” follows a detective in a high-tech future who is trying to solve a grisly murder with the aid of his AI partner Metta, a case complicated by the kidnapping (AInapping?) of the AI by persons unknown, and by the subsequent creation of an emergency backup AI, which soon raises the question of which is the “real” Metta. Although the Kowal, a futuristic police procedural, couldn’t be more different in tone from the MacLeod, they both raise similar questions of identity—how do you determine who’s a “real” person and who isn’t in a world where humans co-exist with equally intelligent AIs and with sentient but artificially created beings of all sorts, even ones with whom you share memories? How do you draw the line between the real and the unreal?

Similar questions are raised in the incisive but powerful “Fighter,” by Colin P. Davies, and in a somewhat different key by Felicity Shoulders’s “Apocalypse Daily,” which suggests that the ruthless back-stabbing and betrayal and double-dealing needed to win some computer games could indoctrinate people toward similar behavior in real life, the unreal world affecting the real, so I guess that the identity thing can be officially identified as the issue’s subtheme. It’s hard to tell what’s “real” in Alan DeNiro’s “Walking Stick Fires,” an Alien Invasion story set in a surreal post-apocalyptic world that’s so gonzo and computer game-like, like Neal Barrett, Jr. on acid, that it’s hard to take it seriously enough on any level while you read it to invest any emotion in it.

The July Asimov’s is another fairly strong issue. The best story here is Paul Cornell’s “The Copenhagen Interpretation,” one of a series of fast-paced and rather strange stories (including Hugo finalist “One of Our Bastards Is Missing”) that Cornell has been writing about the exploits of spy Jonathan Hamilton in the Great Game between nations in a Nineteenth Century Europe where technology has followed a very different path from that of our own timeline, stories that read, as I once said, like Ruritanian romances written by Charles Stross. In this adventure, Hamilton must deal with the consequences of having an old girlfriend pop up in very peculiar circumstances, initiating a chain of consequences that might bring about the end of the world, something Hamilton battles to prevent in a flamboyantly entertaining fashion reminiscent of the adventures of James Bond, or, better, Poul Anderson’s Dominic Flandry, whom I think is his direct ancestor. Also good in July is Chris Beckett’s “Day 29,” a substantial novelette about an interstellar teleportation system which wipes out the user’s memory of the weeks just prior to its use, and the misgivings of one man as the ominous date approaches when he’ll be sent back to Earth and lose the memories of the days that he’s currently living through; there’s some intriguing stuff here, but the story feels unresolved somehow, with plotlines like those about the alien planet’s mysterious indigenes more or less left hanging, as though Beckett had originally intended to write a much longer piece. In “Pug,” Theodora Goss contributes a rather sad but lyrical take on The Secret Garden, Bruce McAllister tells a poignant time-travel story centered around one man’s family, in “The Messenger,” and Kristine Kathryn Rusch shows us a woman in a hopeless situation, trapped on a space station slowly being filled past capacity by refugees from some unspecified cosmic catastrophe, growing grimly resigned to the fact that things are going to get even more hopeless soon, in “Dunyon.” New writer Josh Roseman takes us on a doomed and violent excursion across an unlikely future Earth that might well be called No-Waterworld, in “Bring on the Rain,” new writer Leah Cypess shows us how exacerbated bullying in high school might be an unintended social consequence of genetic engineering, in “Twelvers,” and Norman Spinrad taps into whale song to learn “The Music of the Sphere.”