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The New and Perfect Man: Postscripts 24/25, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, eds. (PS Publishing Ltd., 978-1-848631-65-6, 30.00 Pounds Sterling, 392 pages.) Cover art by Ed Emshwiller.

Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, ed Ian Whates. (Solaris, 978-1-907-922-094, 448 pages.) Cover art by Pye Parr.

TRSF, The Best New Science Fiction, Inspired by Today’s Emerging Technologies, ed. Stephen Cass. (Technology Review, Inc., $7.95, 80 pages.) Cover art and interior illustrations by Chris Foss.

Gravity Dreams, by Stephen Baxter. (PS Publishing Ltd., 978-1-848631-89-2, 11.99 Pounds Sterling, 101 pages.) Cover art and Endpaper Art by David A. Hardy.

 

Almost everything in The New and Perfect Man, the continuation of Postscripts magazine in anthology form, edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, is finely crafted, but overall I somehow found it faintly disappointing. The editors will shake their heads and sigh wearily when they read this review, for it’s a long-time complaint of mine, one I’ve made about Postscripts before, but there’s little science fiction here, and not even much fantasy, the bulk of the anthology being made up of slipstream and literary surrealism, with the occasional bit of soft horror—which, for a book that costs thirty pounds sterling, makes it a somewhat questionable buy, for me at least. For someone of my no-doubt unevolved tastes, reading almost four hundred pages of slipstream, no matter how intricately and cunningly crafted line-by-line, becomes something like eating an enormous blancmange all at one go—no matter how tasty it is, you begin to long for some meat and potatoes by the time you’re finished.

If you’re a fan of slipstream, your mileage may vary greatly, and you may instead like the very stories that didn’t impress me, but for my tastes, the best stories here are, unsurprisingly, the occasional science fiction and fantasy stories. The stories I liked best were probably Keith Brooke’s “Imago,” a complex story of a man investigating what caused an earlier version of himself to commit genocide on an alien planet, and Ken Macleod’s “The Vorkuta Event,” a story about a creepy Lovecraftian intrusion into our reality that took place in Cold-War Russia. Also good is Adam Roberts’s “Thrownness,” in which (for no reason ever explained), a man is cut loose in time, and only gets to spend a couple of days in a particular timeline before being kicked to another, all of them nearly identical to our own; Roberts himself mentions the movie Groundhog Day, something most readers would probably be thinking anyway, but the response of his protagonist to discovering that what he does in one timeline has no affect on the next, and therefore no lasting consequences, is more amoral and more ruthlessly logical than anything Bill Murray’s character did, including rape, robbery, and murder, all of which he justifies to himself as having been perfectly reasonable things to do under the circumstances. Robert Reed gives us another tale of ecological terrorism (a popular theme this year), this one on a domestic scale, in “Euphoria.” Jay Lake tells a vivid mythological fantasy in “Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors,” and there are a couple of effectively moody, low-key ghost stories, Rio Youers’s “The Ghost of Lillian Bliss” and Joel Lane and Mat Joiner’s “Ashes in the Water.”

Although there’s a couple of slipstreamish fantasy stories thrown in, as seems almost obligatory for SF anthologies these days, the bulk of Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, the resurrection of the old Solaris Book of Science Fiction series, now edited by Ian Whates, is made up of solid core science fiction, which makes it much more to my taste—in fact, I’d say that Solaris Rising is one of the three or four best SF anthologies published this year.

There’s lots of good stuff here. Among the best: Dave Hutchinson tells the story of a man reluctantly saving the world, over and over again, from a potentially disastrous Lovecraftian intrusion in “The Incredible Exploding Man.” Ian McDonald gives us a sly look at how social media might be used to overthrow corrupt regimes by seeming to give the dead a voice in “A Smart Well-Mannered Uprising of the Dead.” Ken Macleod introduces us to expatriate SF writers living in Paris after fleeing an American dictatorship, who witness a potentially world-changing event, in “The Best Science Fiction of the Day Three.” Keith Brooke and Eric Brown follow a guilt-stricken man returning to a pastoral planet to reluctantly deliver a bit of devastating news, in “Eternity’s Children.” Lavie Tidhar clones Che Guevara, with far-ranging effects, in “The Lives and Deaths of Che Guevara.” Alastair Reynolds tells us about a scientist obsessed with leaving a message for future civilizations to find, at any cost, in “For the Ages.” Stephen Baxter’s melancholy “Rock Day” is about the last boy left “alive”—sort of—after all other humans have gone. In “Eluna,” Stephen Palmer takes us to a fascinating although somewhat opaque future (one that made me wonder if the backstory would be less murky if I’d read any of his novels, although I don’t know if they’re set in the same universe or not) for a story about a young girl struggling to win her place in a very strange society. There’s also good stuff here by Pat Cadigan, Adam Roberts, Jack Skillingstead, and others—in fact, there’s almost nothing here that isn’t at least good, and some that’s outstanding. A very solid debut for a series that I hope will continue.

MIT’s Technology Review magazine has published good SF in the past, by Greg Egan, David Marusek, and others, and now they’ve published a special all-SF issue, TRSF, The Best New Science Fiction, Inspired by Today’s Emerging Technologies, edited by Stephen Cass, which promises to be the first in an annual series of such issues, functioning as quasi-anthologies in magazine form. The first TRSF is, as promised by the title, all solid core SF, leaning toward hard SF, near-future stories that deal with the possibilities (and threats) of emerging technologies, most set within the next ten or twenty years. This does give them a certain similarity, you won’t find any far future or flamboyant Space Opera stories here, but the quality of the twelve individual stories is quite high, and, considered as an anthology, TRSF would certainly have to qualify as one of the year’s best. All the work here is solid and interesting, but the best stories are probably Pat Cadigan’s “Cody,” an ingenious and suspenseful postcyberpunk adventure, Ken Macleod’s “The Surface of Last Scattering,” which deals with father/son issues between another well-intentioned ecological terrorist (this one somebody who releases a bioweapon that destroys all paper on Earth, in order to wipe the slate of the past clean) and his estranged child, Gwyneth Jones’s “The Flame Is Roses, The Smoke is Briars,” in which “neuronauts” utilizing an experimental technology strain for a glimpse of the distant past, and Elizabeth Bear’s “Gods of the Forge,” in which a young woman must struggle with the ominous implications of a supposedly benign mind-control technology—but there are also good stories here by Vandana Singh, Geoffrey A. Landis, Ken Liu, Joe Haldeman, and others.

Two of the stories sound a mild cautionary note about the totally wired, invasive, Twitter/Facebook future boosted by cyber enthusiasts, both of them, interestingly, by authors usually numbered among those enthusiasts: Cory Doctorow’s funny “The Brave Little Toaster,” about the annoying intrusion of “smart” materials that constantly blather commercials into our lives, and Paul Di Filippo’s “Specter-Bombing the Beer Goggles,” which wryly exposes a real danger inherent in the “everybody’s-hooked-into-Virtual Reality all the time” future. The best job here of showing how “emerging technologies” could believably transform our lives in a positive way is to be found in Vandana Singh’s “Indra’s Web,” which explores how alternate power sources could help to end poverty in rural India (and, by implication, elsewhere).

Just a look at the contents page, which classifies the stories by category, shows how things have changed in the last few decades: there’s two stories about “Communications,” two about “Biomedicine,” two stories about “Energy,” and stories about “Computing,” “Robotics,” “Web,” and even “Materials,” but only one story about “Spaceflight,” and in that story, Landis’s “Private Space,” the effort to launch a privately-funded spacecraft is unsuccessful (although the protagonists remain determined not to give up). A collection like this would certainly have examined very different areas forty years ago.

It’s probably going to be difficult to find this on most newsstands, so your best bet is probably to order it directly from the publisher at www.technologyreview.com/sf It only takes about a week to arrive in the mail, and costs $7.95—and at that price for the quality of the material you get, it’s one of the best reading bargains of the year.

Since the publication of the first stories in the sequence in 1987, Stephen Baxter’s “Xeelee” series has grown into one of the most extensive and recomplicated series in science fiction, consisting of dozens of stories, two dedicated collections, and at least twelve novels, with the stories themselves, chronicling humanity’s war with an implacable alien enemy, the Xeelee, taking place across a span of billions of years of human history. The latest addition to this complex sequence is the novella “Gravity Dreams,” which PS Publishing has released as part of a two-novella chapbook, packaged with the reprint novella “Raft,” which was later expanded into Baxter’s first novel, Raft. “Gravity Dreams” is a direct sequel to “Raft,” taking place millions of years after the events of the original novella, in which a doomed scientific expedition plunges into a bizarre universe where the force of gravity is a billion times stronger than it is in our own, and becomes stranded there. “Gravity Dreams” splits its action between the humans in our universe, who are bracing themselves for what may be the final deadly assault by the Xeelee, and the inhabitants of the other universe, descended from the Raft’s original crew, who have become adapted to their radical new environment over the ages. A surviving piece of high technology from the original Raft enables communication to be established between the two universes, and prompts the mounting of a rescue expedition of sorts to retrieve at least some of the castaways from their exile, with mixed results.

If you haven’t read any other Xeelee stories, your best bet is to just ignore the extremely complicated backstory—Cliff’s Notes version: there’s an alien race called the Xeelee who have been fighting a war against humanity for billions of years, causing humanity to evolve and adapt into strange forms in order to survive—and enjoy the pleasures of the foreground action, which are considerable. The volume also contains a cover and endpaper art by renowned SF artist David A. Hardy, and makes an attractive package.