F&SF, September/October
Asimov’s, August.
Asimov’s, September.
Interzone 233.
Interzone 234.
There’s more SF than usual in the September/October issue of F&SF, and most of the strongest stories in the issue are the SF ones. The best story in September/October is probably Geoff Ryman’s “What We Found”; the speculative element here is a bit unlikely, but Ryman is one of the best in the genre at telling stories set in evocatively described Third World milieus, rivaled only by Ian McDonald and Paolo Bacigalupi, and the vivid Nigerian setting, showing a nation caught between the modern world and the old world of tribal superstitions, is one of the story’s strengths—along with the complex, completely believable characterization, and the emotionally powerful, almost grueling, interactions between those characters. If not for the speculative element, and the fact that it’s appearing in F&SF, it wouldn’t be surprising to see “What We Found” show up in mainstream Best of the Year collections. Also good is Karl Bunker’s “Overtaken”; like most of Bunker’s work to date, there’s a faintly old-fashioned, retro sensibility to this, but he does a good job of putting a modern twist on an old theme, the slow colonization ship overtaken by a faster, more technologically advanced one, and provides a sharp, unexpected twist at the end. Much the same could be said of Daniel Marcus’s “Bright Moment,” which marks a welcome return to the genre by Marcus, a good writer who has been silent for some years—the basic set-up is familiar, a corporation in the midst of terraforming an alien planet makes the unwanted discovery that there are sentient beings already living there, but Marcus does a first-rate job of taking it in an unexpected direction, quite movingly by the end. Sarah Langan’s “The Man Inside Black Betty” is a suspenseful story about at a future Earth (one set rather close to the present, though, in 2012, which means the story will be obsolete before it’s likely to be reprinted) threatened by a black hole—exciting, although the science is questionable at best. Chris De Vito’s “Anise” is a rather icky look at Cyborg Love in the near future.
The fantasy stories here are weaker. The best of them is probably Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Where Have All the Young Men Gone?,” an account of a tourist inadvertently caught up in a battle to stop a vengeful ghost, and willing to sacrifice everything to put her to rest (although why his sacrifice should stop the Milkmaid, who, after all, is already dead, is unclear). M. Rickert’s “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece” is strange and elegant, more slipstream than horror, Deborah J. Ross’s “A Borrowed Heart” is an entertaining Victorian fantasy about a Fallen Woman returning to the home from which she’s been exiled to battle a succubus, and “Time and Tide,” by the late Alan Ryan, a creepy story about a guilt-stricken man literally haunted by the drowning death of his brother, which he feels that he didn’t do enough to prevent.
The August Asimov’s is also a strong issue. Best story here is probably Michael Swanwick’s “For I Have Laid Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again,” the second major story Swanwick has published in less than a month (the other being “The Dala Horse” from Tor.com). In some ways, this comes close to being a disguised mainstream story, since the same basic story could have been told as taking place in Ireland during the Troubles without any major changes of plot, but the SF details that are here are used sparingly but cleverly to establish an even greater potential distance between the protagonist and his lover, and the story is exquisitely written, with a depth of emotion rare in Swanwick’s work; this one clearly spoke to him on a personal level. Also good here is Robert Silverberg’s “The End of the Line,” a major novelette about the origins of the war between the native Shapeshifters and the Terran colonists that raged on the immense planet of Majipoor, the setting for Silverberg’s famous novel Lord Valentine’s Castle and its many sequels. Lisa Goldstein gives us a Steampunk Alternate History tale about espionage and insidious Spanish efforts to sabotage England’s new workforce of mechanical homunculi in “Paradise is a Walled Garden.” New writer Philip Brewer comes up with an ingenious idea, one I don’t remember seeing before, in “Watch Bees,” where the eponymous bees are programmed to guard small family farms by stinging to death anyone who doesn’t match a certain genetic profile; the story seems to be set in the near-future after some sort of severe economic collapse, and my first reaction was that it was a good thing it wasn’t taking place in today’s society, or the watch bee system would last no longer than it took the relatives of the first person to be stung to death to rush into court. Melanie Tem tells us of a human child raised by aliens, with devastating if unintentional psychological effects on the child, in “Corn Teeth.”
The rest of the issue is less strong, although still interesting. New writer Will Ludwigsen takes us out into the woods in search of strange phenomenon in company with a Boy Scout-like troupe led by Charles Fort, in “We Were Wonder Scouts,” and new writer Zachary Jernigan spins a melodramatic and somewhat confusing tale of humans kept as pets by aliens after the destruction of the Earth, in “Paris.”
The September Asimov’s is less strong overall than the August issue, although there’s still some good stuff. The best story is probably Allen M. Steele’s “The Observation Post,” a nicely underplayed story about a Navy blimp crewman blundering across a nest of time-travelers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the dreadful choice he has to make as a result. Robert Reed is usually not thought of as a horror writer, but he can produce a really nasty one when he wants to, and does so in the dark and unsettling “Stalker,” about a serial killer’s conflicted AI helpmate. “Shadow Angel” by new writer Erick Melton is a bit confusing and hard to get into, particularly in the opening few pages, but eventually rewards the reader by delivering a lot of intriguing new conceptualization. R. Neube tells the absorbing story of a boy struggling to accept grown-up—and very dangerous—responsibilities in a society haunted by a deadly alien plague, in “Grandma Said.”
The rest of the stories are somewhat less successful. Neal Barrett, Jr. describes a drastic future form of medical triage in “D.O.C.S,” new writer Alan Wall tells an ultimately rather pointless story with an intriguing character at its core in “Burning Bibles,” and Ian Creasey tells a story that may or may not seem a bit silly to you, depending on how you feel about the existence of “The Odor of Sanctity.”
Interzone has been making something of a specialty lately of bleak stories set in totalitarian near-future British dystopias, and that description fits the lead story in Interzone 233, “The Silver Wind,” by new writer Nina Allan, a depressing—although brilliantly crafted and sensitively characterized—study of a man trying to find in alternate timelines the happiness that has eluded him (and just about everybody else) in the grim future Britain in which he lives. He sort of succeeds, at least in finding a less-depressing alternate Britain, although the speed with which he gives up his supposedly obsessive search for his lost love once he finds a more tolerable society to live in is somewhat disappointing, and the mechanism for the timeline-shifting is a piece of handwaveium worthy of Star Trek. Most of the rest of the issue is fairly glum too, with Chris Butler contributing “Tell Me Anything,” a story about an unlikely world in which everyone communicates emotions to each other by exuding spores (although surely “spores” is the wrong word; pheromones, perhaps?), and a long, grim, and somewhat muddled story by new writer Ray Cluley, “Tethered to the Cold and Dying,” in which important pieces of the exposition seem to have been left out altogether. Only Tim Lees’s “Crosstown Traffic,” concerning a human messenger who is sent on a mysterious mission by shady alien Damon Ruynan-like underworld characters, musters any kind of energy or elan.
Interzone 234 is less bleak. The best story here is Lavie Tidhar’s “In the Season of the Mango Rains,” which acts as a sort of sampler of recent themes and locales from Tidhar’s work while also managing to deliver a strong autumnal kick without being, well, bleak. Suzanne Palmer’s “The Ceiling is Sky” starts out in a pretty grim dystopia, but at least lets the protagonist break out of it at the end and achieve a better life for herself. Jon Ingold’s “Sleepers” has an intriguing premise about the last surviving relative of a former colonist on another planet issuing dire warnings while slowly dying in an old age home about how the stargate to that planet, which had been shut down after the colony was abandoned, shouldn’t be re-opened, because it would allow a strange alien menace, which the man’s grandmother had told him about but which the government doesn’t believe ever existed, access to Earth; the story ends with the old man dead and the stargate about to be re-opened without ever establishing definitely if he’d been right in his warnings or not, but I like to imagine that slavering hordes of Lovecraftian monsters are poised to pour in as soon as the gate is reactivated. “Her Scientifiction, Far Future, Medieval Fantasy,” by Jason Sanford, is a game-world story, although the protagonist is embedded as a vital part of the virtual game structure itself rather than being a punter playing through. Sanford works some nice changes on the theme here, and the story is fun to read, but, in the final analysis, it’s still a game-world story, a form I’m growing tired of, perhaps because I’m not a gamer myself, perhaps because the fact that it’s all taking place in a computer game makes it hard to really care what happens to the characters. Will McIntosh’s “Incompatible” is, appropriately enough, a dark fantasy that it seems to me would be more at home in companion magazine Black Static than in Interzone.