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Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente. (WSFA Press, 978-1-936896-00-4, $25.00, 127 pages). Cover art by Aurelien Police.

Asimov’s, October/November.

The Urban Fantasy Anthology, Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale, eds. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-018-6, $15.95, 431 pages). Cover art by Elizabeth Story.

Alien Contact, Marty Halpern, ed. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-281-9, 491 pages). Cover art by Dave Palumbo.

 

“Silently and Very Fast,” by Catherynne M. Valente, is a novella released as a stand-alone chapbook by WSFA Press, in honor of the annual Washington, D.C.-area convention, Capclave, where Valente is a Guest of Honor this year. A couple of months ago, I was discussing stories where SF is disguised as fantasy, and this one, which reads like lyrical mythological fantasy for long stretches, fits that bill well. Exotic and beautiful, it uses evocative fantasy motifs to examine one of science fiction’s most fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human? Where’s the line between human consciousness and artificial consciousness, and how can you tell when it’s been crossed? If it’s crossed, from insentience into sentience, does that mean that the machine now has a “soul”? The story makes for a fascinating contrast with this year’s Hugo-winning novella, “The Lifecycle of Softwear Objects,” by Ted Chiang, which examined a similar concept, the incremental growth of Artificial Intelligence into true consciousness as a result of human nurturing and close involvement with human families, but the two stories couldn’t be more different in mood and approach.

The best story in the October/November Asimov’s, and one of the best to appear in the magazine all year, is Kij Johnson’s “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” a long and compelling novella that also straddles the borderland between fantasy and science fiction. On the surface, it seems at first to be set in one of those milieus reminiscent of an 18th or 19th Century rural England with all the familiar names changed that have become popular in fantasy in the last few years, but certain subtle clues, including the descriptions of the nature of the mist river that the eponymous bridge-builder is attempting to cross (mist which is populated with huge enigmatic monsters who could well be aliens), enables the story to be legitimately read as science fiction as well, perhaps set on a lost colony world where society has had to start over again, losing several centuries worth of technology in the process. The main story involves Kit, an engineer charged with building a bridge between Nearside and Farside across the mysterious and deadly river of mist that separates them, and the fact that the engineering details of the bridge-building are set out as rigorously and completely as anything you could hope for in Analog, with unforseen setbacks encountered and problems solved through human ingenuity, also helps to give the story a science-fictional atmosphere, even though the technology involved for the most part isn’t anything you couldn’t have encountered on Earth in 1880. That the building of the bridge also eventually involves everyone else in the surrounding towns to one degree or another and ends up changing their lives profoundly in unexpected ways is what, along with the vivid, complex, and sympathetically drawn characters, gives the story its larger aspect, and much of its power. It’s a quietly told story, not as flamboyant as the Valente, with few big, melodramatic developments, but it’s as engrossing as anything I’ve read this year.

Also substantial here is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s novella “Stealth,” part of her extensive “Diving” series that started with 2005’s “Diving into the Wreck” and has continued since through a sequence of novellas and novels, most concerned with the dangers involved in trying to salvage now-forgotten high technology from the drifting wrecks of ancient spaceships. This one deals with the attempts of a scientist, once an investigator herself, to sabotage research into the mysterious FTL “stealth tech” taken from the old wrecks, research that she considers too dangerous to be allowed to proceed, and also with her troubled relationship with her ex-husband, a relationship she seems unable to extricate herself from decisively. Nancy Kress’s “A Hundred Hundred Daisies” is a grim and emotionally powerful story of the coming water wars that will be fought over dwindling resources in a near-future that unfortunately doesn’t seem any less-likely now than it did when I first heard the prospect raised, back in the late ‘60s—considering the historic drought of Biblical proportions that Texas is going through at the moment, perhaps even more likely. Eleanor Arnason’s “My Husband Steinn” is a droll troll story, wryly humorous rather than laugh-out-loud funny, even a bit touching toward the end, in which Iceland’s famous trolls are treated like embattled indigenous species rather than mythological beings. Eugene Mirabelli’s “The Pastry Chef, the Nanotechnologist, The Aerobics Instructor, and The Plumber” is that rarity in the genre, a genuinely sweet and good-natured story that manages to be sweet without slopping over into sticky sentimentality—rather reminds me of something by James Thurber or John Collier.

Jack Skillingstead’s “Free Dog” is an ingenious story about how a virtual copy of a pet dog becomes an item of contention in a bitter divorce, and eventually propagates into a viral internet meme, with everyone wanting one—the story could have been told as mainstream by replacing the viral dog with any other spitefully contested item, and the speculative content here will probably prove to be of no more lasting importance to humanity than Pet Rocks or any other craze, but it allows Skillingstead to let his protagonist work out some of his resentment and anger, and come to something like acceptance and peace in the end. Kit Reed’s “The Outside Event” is a sly satire of reality shows, with a show that’s something like a strange mashup between “The Biggest Loser” and one of those exclusive literary workshops/writers retreats. New writer Dominica Phetteplace’s “The Cult of Whale Worship” is a well-executed but depressingly bleak tale of a well-intentioned ecological terrorist (the only kind you seem to be allowed to portray in an even mildly sympathetic light these days), sort of a less apocalyptic version of James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain.” New writer Jason K. Chapman’s “This Petty Pace” is a competent but rather standard time-paradox tale. New writer Derek Künsken contributes a broad cyberpunk satire done with bonobos and gibbons in “To Live and Die in Gibbontown.”

These days, no two critics seem to entirely agree on just what the subgenre (or group of related subgenres) known as “Urban Fantasy” consists of, and the anthologies trying to parse and define this inchoate territory are rolling in, with more to come. One such is a big reprint anthology, The Urban Fantasy Anthology, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale, two of the most respected figures in fantasy literature (of whatever type) today. This is one of the best reprint anthologies of the year in terms of literary value, and you certainly get more than your money’s worth of good fiction, but having two editors from such radically different aesthetic camps makes the book a bit scattered, and I’m not sure it ever really gels into anything resembling a coherent whole, being instead something of a grab-bag. Beagle and Lansdale divide “Urban Fantasy” up into three sub-categories—“Mythic Fiction,” “Paranormal Romance,” and “Noir Fantasy.”

“Mythic Fiction” seems to be what I would have called “Urban Fantasy” throughout most of my career, stories—often (but not always) lighthearted—that deal with the intersection of magical realms with the modern world, with the intrusion of fantasy creatures into everyday reality, and, occasionally, with what happens when mortals blunder into enchanted lands where they shouldn’t go—stuff with deep roots in the old Unknown magazine and the works of people like L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt, carried up through the final decades of the last century by people like Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Tom Holt, Tim Powers, and Esther Friesner, and by the anthologies of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This is the kind of thing I like best myself. However the big bestseller boom of the last couple of decades has been in “Paranormal Romance,” the explosion in which the editors attribute, probably correctly, to the immense success of the TV show “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” and the desire to produce more stuff like that, either in print or on television. Things get a bit murkier with “Noir Fantasy,” which seems to be sort of like “Paranormal Romance” except with more emphasis on Private Detectives, mean streets, criminals, and other noir elements drawn from Black Mask writers such as Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler and from old black-and-white noir movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s. The distinction between these last two seems rather a fine one, and often a story would seem just as comfortable in one section as in the other, depending on how you arbitrarily decided to categorize it. Much in both categories would just have been called “Horror” back in the day.

Regardless of where you categorize it, there’s some fine fiction here. Drawing from all three categories, the best stories overall here are probably Neil Gaiman’s subtle Hollywood satire “The Goldfish Bowl and Other Stories,” Beagle’s own whimsical “Julie’s Unicorn,” Tim Powers’s “The Bible Repairman,” Thomas M. Disch’s chilling “The White Man,” Bruce McAllister’s metaphysical “Hit,” and Lansdale’s zombie apocalypse extravaganza, “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks,” but there are also first-rate stories here by Susan Palwick, Charles de Lint, Suzy McKee Charnas, Carrie Vaughn, Patty Briggs, Emma Bull, and others, and nothing here is really bad.

There’s no confusion about genre classification in Alien Contact, edited by Marty Halpern—it’s just what it says that it is, stories about contacts with aliens, all of them science fiction, and all of them considerably more varied, subtle, and intelligent than the flood of shoot-’em-up Alien Invasion movies we got over the last year or so. This is another really solid reprint anthology, and another excellent value for your money. The best stories here are probably Bruce Sterling’s “Swarm,” Michael Swanwick’s “A Midwinter’s Tale,” Bruce McAllister’s “Kin,” Molly Gloss’s “Lambing Season,” Pat Cadigan’s “Angel,” Paul McAuley’s “The Thought War,” and Nancy Kress’s “Laws of Survival,” but there are also good stories by Neil Gaiman, George Alec Effinger, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Baxter, Mike Resnick, Harry Turtledove, and thirteen others. Like The Urban Fantasy Anthology, there’s really nothing bad here.