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F&SF, November/December.

Asimov’s, December.

Interzone 235.

Interzone 236.

Interzone 237.

 

The best story in the November/December F&SF is Carolyn Ives Gilman’s novella “The Ice Owl,” a moody and faintly melancholy story about a young girl living with her irresponsible mother in a slum neighborhood in a city on an alien planet who meets an old man with an enigmatic past who eventually becomes her tutor and mentor; a subplot features her attempts to penetrate the secret of the old man’s mysterious past. Although her mentor greatly widens her intellectual horizons, not all of the knowledge he leads her into is pleasant, and the story resonates with echoes of loss, of worlds vanished and loved ones destroyed, even of genocide, and with the foreboding sense, gradually gathering strength as the novella progresses, that the cycle of loss and destruction is about to start all over again, sweeping the girl’s familiar world into oblivion this time. In its basics, the story could easily have been told about a young girl on the Lower East Side of New York meeting an old refugee who had fled the horrors of World War II in Europe, but the science fictional details are ingenious and cleverly chosen, and add an evocativeness and strangeness that justifies telling it as SF instead.

Also good in November/December is “Object Three,” by James L. Cambias, a slam-bang space adventure in which a band of ruthless desperadoes double-cross and double double-cross each other in the struggle to possess the key that may unlock the mysteries of an enigmatic alien artifact that might be billions of years old and contain secrets so valuable as to be beyond price. Cambias tells this one fast and taut, and keeps you guessing to the end as to who is going to ultimately triumph in this pavane of conspiracy and betrayal. Similar in tone is the novella “Quartet and Triptych,” by Matthew Hughes, another adventure of resourceful master thief Luff Imbry, set in a milieu heavily (and acknowledgedly) influenced by the works of Jack Vance, an interstellar society that exists many millennia from now but still an era or two before humanity gives up on space travel and retreats to the haunted gloom of Vance’s Dying Earth. This is technically a reprint, first published last year as a novella chapbook from PS Publishing, but as probably few of the magazine’s readers will have seen it in that form, I doubt that too many of them are going to object to encountering it here. Like all of the Luff Imbry stories, this is great fun, a satisfyingly robust and colorful tale, at least as full of double-crosses as the Cambias, in which Imbry matches wits with some sinister and powerful high-tech “ghosts” from ages past for the possession of the ultimate prize (until the next adventure, anyway).

The rest of the November/December issue, from this point down, is weaker. F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey delivers a typically well-written fantasy, “How Peter Met Pan,” which ultimately left me a bit confused as to what the point of all the macabre and somewhat gristly goings-on it contains had been. Tim Sullivan contributes another nicely characterized fantasy, “Under Glass,” which ultimately goes on a bit too long for a bit too little a payoff (and which really leaves unanswered the story’s basic question, why Bob would have wanted his soul imprisoned in a Mason jar in the first place). There’s also a hereto unpublished fantasy story by the late Evangeline Walton, author of the acclaimed Mabinogion tetralogy and winner of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, “They That Have Wings”—unfortunately, there’s usually a reason why trunk stories end up in the trunk, and this one should have been left there.

Asimov’s, which had a strong year, ends 2011 with a somewhat weak December issue overall, although there are a few good stories. The best story here is probably Connie Willis’s Christmas novella, “All About Emily,” which deals with the efforts of an “artificial”—basically, an android—to join the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, and the established human Broadway star who forms an uneasy relationship with “her,” mentoring and helping the artificial while all the while being all too aware of the events of the movie All About Eve, which is constantly referenced in the story, in which a star is effectively replaced by her innocent-looking understudy, who plots to bring her down and take her place. The fear that human performers or artists will be replaced by robots or computers is an old one, going back in the field at least as far as Walter M. Miller’s Hugo-winning “The Darfsteller” in 1955, in which human actors are put out of business by artificial ones; there have been several different takes on the theme this year alone, including a story elsewhere by Ken Liu, with whom Willis shares a Table of Contents here, “Real Artists”. Willis’s take on the theme here is slyly funny, as should come as no surprise to those familiar with her comic stories, but is also deceptively light, raising some real and very serious issues about the kind of relationships that might develop between humans and their own artificial “children.” Also good here is the aforementioned Ken Liu’s “The Countable,” a complex story told from the perspective of a troubled savant-like boy. Although an already accomplished and highly promising new writer, Liu has a tendency to load his stories with static infodumps, something he should work on; this story will be too math-heavy for many readers, including charts and graphs included as part of the text, none of which I’m convinced is actually necessary to the telling of the basic human story.

Pamela Sargent’s “Strawberry Birdies” is another story about a child who sees the world in ways that nobody else does, similar to the Liu story above and Nancy Fulda’s “Movement” from an issue earlier this year, this one with a time-travel angle reminiscent of John Varley’s “Air Raid.” Steve Rasnic Tem contributes “Ephemera,” an autumnal study of a rare-book dealer whose world slowly slips away as print books gradually become obsolete. New writer Suzanne Palmer gives us “Surf,” a fast-paced but rather unlikely Space Opera adventure in which the protagonist operates with near-supernatural competence, all too clearly aware of having the Author on her side in situations where a mistake in timing of a second would mean certain death. ““Run,” Bakri Says,” by new writer Ferrett Steinmetz, is a gaming-world story of sorts, in which a woman must die again and again and again until one of her “iterations” finally gets it right and solves the problem. Tim McDaniel’s “The List” is an unfunny joke story.

The strongest story in the July-August Interzone, Interzone 235, is Mercurio D. Rivera’s “For Love’s Delirium Haunts the Fractured Mind,” another in the series that Rivera has been writing about the Wergen, aliens who have become obsessed with the “beauty” of humans and who trade advanced technology for the right to follow them worshipfully around in a manner that always reminds me of Al Capp’s Shmoos, creatures who would obligingly fall over dead for you to eat if you looked even the slightest bit hungry. This one shows us more of how the Wergen obsession is an actual physical addiction, one with a high and ever-increasing cost for Wergen society, and introducing the idea that there are Wergen radicals fighting to free their fellows from their obsession with humans, by acts of terrorism if necessary. The only thing I didn’t like about the story was that the first-person narrator dies at the end of the story (“and then I died!”), something that editors used to discourage new writers from doing when I was young, but which happens twice in this issue, with the first-person narrator also dying at the end of Jon Wallace’s messy and muddled “The Walrus and the Icebreaker.” Matthew Cook’s “Insha’Allah” is better crafted, with some nice characterization, but could have been set in modern-day Iraq or Afghanistan with almost no changes necessary. Al Robertson’s “Of Dawn” is a moody and evocative fantasy about a grieving woman who encounters a Pan-like mythic figure in the remote English backcountry. Gareth L. Powell’s “Eleven Minutes” is a rather slight Alternate World story.

Another Wergen story by Mercurio D. Rivera, “Tethered,” features in the September/October Interzone, Interzone 236; this one examines the peculiar mating dynamics of the Wergen through the lens of a friendship between a young Wergen girl and a young human girl, a friendship doomed when the Wergen girl comes of age, and manages to generate a strong emotional charge by the end. Jason Sanford’s “The Ever-Dreaming Verdict of Plagues” is another of his “plague birds” stories, set in a strange post-Apocalyptic world; entertaining, but the backstory may be becoming a little hard to follow by now for those unfamiliar with the earlier stories. Fiona Moore’s “The Metaphor” is another Virtual World story, Jon Ingold’s “The Fall of the City of Silver” is a fantasy, Stephen Kotowych’s “A Time for Raven” is a well-crafted near-fantasy with an almost subliminal fantastic element.

The November/December Interzone, Interzone 237, is a strong issue after a couple of relatively weak ones. The best story here, and one of the strongest stories Interzone has published all year, is “Digital Rites,” by Jim Hawkins, another story, like “All About Emily” and “Real Artists,” about how human creativity is being supplanted, or at least intensively and intrusively “supplemented,” by artificial means, in this case a massive computer system that allows filmmakers to more or less experience a performance through the eyes of the actors, and subjectively control it. This is a vividly written and strongly characterized story, with a tense murder/espionage plot running through it, highly entertaining. (I’d like to believe in the hopeful conclusion about human nature and the viewing audience that Hawkins comes to at the end—but, alas, I’m not sure that I do.) Lavie Tidhar’s “The Last Osama” is also vividly written, almost lurid, in fact, but somehow Tidhar is skilled enough to make the story work, although it takes us on a melodramatic journey into the Heart of Darkness through a world mystically transformed by the death of Osama Bin Laden into something like a weird Spaghetti Western. This is much too surreal to be considered to be legitimate science fiction, but, whatever it is, it’s a lot of fun, and will stick with you after you turn the last page. Douglas Lain’s “Erasing the Concept of Sex from a Photobooth” is also surreal, but a good deal less fun, in spite of a fair splattering of erotica. Caspian Gray’s “Insect Joy” is a glum and rather implausible story about a miracle cure caused by crickets; since no explanation for this is ever advanced, I’m not sure I’d call this one science fiction either.