41

F&SF, January/February

Asimov’s, January

Asimov’s, February

Clarkesworld, January

 

There are several good fantasy stories in January/February F&SF, but not much science fiction. The best story in the issue, by a good margin, is “The Color Least Used by Nature,” by Ted Kosmatka. The fantastic element here is miniscule—walking trees whose especially supple wood is used by a shipwright to build particularly desirable ships—but the story is really about family relationships, and does a marvelous job of describing life on an remote South Sea Island as one world slowly fades away and a new world takes shape as colonialism takes hold, as the old ways die, replaced by the changes brought by “progress,” which do not by any means always change things for the better. This is quite different from Kosmatka’s usual work, which has tended toward high-tech thrillers about science, skating on the edge of cyberpunk, but this is no less absorbing, and actually quite moving by the end. It joins a couple of recent SF stories by Lavie Tidhar in using a South Seas setting, an atypical one for the genre, very well indeed. Although not quite as emotionally affecting as the Kosmatka, a similar fantasy, also very well-written and characterized with a miniscule fantastic element, is John G. McDaid’s “Umbrella Men,” marking one of McDaid’s few returns to print since his “Jigoku no Mokushiroku,” his first sale, won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1996. Both stories are very close to mainstream, and either could easily have been told without any fantastic element at all (and would probably be appearing in mainstream Best of the Year anthologies if they had been, and appeared in a non-genre market). At core, both stories are really about the passing of the torch from one generation to the next, from father to son (with, in the Kosmatka, an element of the sins of the father coming back to haunt him in the guise of his own child). The major weakness of the McDaid, and the main reason I rate the Kosmatka a bit higher, is that the fantastic element seems pretty arbitrary, even more so than walking trees—why a magic umbrella as opposed to a magic anything else? (The author’s story-ending note tells us why an umbrella—and it does turn out to be pretty arbitrary).

Also good in January/February is a more straightforward genre fantasy, with a touch of metafiction, “Scrap Dragon,” by Naomi Kritzer, an amusing story of a narrator telling a tale about a dragon and a princess to someone, constantly interrupted by questions and complaints from whoever they’re telling it to, and adjusting the tale to suit as they go along. “Small Towns,” by Felicity Shoulders, set in a village in France being rebuilt after it was destroyed in World War I, puts a modern spin on the Thumbelina story; it would be listed as a fantasy, I guess, although there’s no real fantastic element other than the initial conceit that a woman small enough to be mailed in a box and live in a dollhouse could exist in the first place (and no magic is evoked to explain that—it just happens). The best SF story in the issue is probably Albert E. Cowdrey’s post Cold-War spy comedy, “Mindbender,” concerning a clash between agents who possess remote-sensing and mind-controlling abilities, rather like The Men Who Stare at Goats with a higher body-count. Lewis Shiner tells an almost subliminal dystopian future/Earth-ruined-by-climate-change (except for the very rich) story in “Canto MCML”—effective when you think about it afterward, although if you let your attention wander for a second, you’ll miss the SF element altogether.

Everything below this point in the issue is a bit weaker. Alexander Jablokov tells the not-terribly-serious (although somewhat icky) story of a future sex-worker who must radically adjust herself to accommodate the bizarre genitalia of alien customers, in “The Comfort of Strangers.” Ken Liu tells a story somewhat similar to the Cowdrey, “Maxwell’s Demon,” in which a Japanese-American woman with psychic abilities (in this case, the ability to communicate with ghosts) is forced to become a spy for the Allies during World War II, although, unlike Cowdrey’s, Liu’s story is not at all lighthearted—rather harrowing and grim, in fact, with a much higher body-count, and lots of rape and atrocities. K.D. Wentworth depicts a peculiar kind of alien invasion in “Alien Land,” a story clearly in part inspired by the current mortgage crisis. Michael Alexander takes us to the trenches of World War I for a rather unlikely fantasy, one whose whimsical tone doesn’t match well with the slaughter going on overhead, in “In the Trenches.” And Ron Goulart offers us a typical Goulartish knock-about farce in “The Secret of the City of Gold.”

The January Asimov’s is a strong issue, and contains one of the best stories I’ve read so far this year, one I wouldn’t be surprised to see on next year’s award ballots, “In the House of Aryaman, A Lonely Signal Burns,” by Elizabeth Bear. This novella is set in a future India that will inevitably draw comparisons with Ian McDonald’s stories set in a similar milieu, but Bear manages to evoke a different feeling and mood while also dealing evocatively with a society caught part-way between the modern world and traditions thousands of years old, and adapting, sometimes radically, to the problems generated by global climate change. She uses this setting as a place in which to tell a complex and ingenious murder mystery which couldn’t take place in our current-day world, concerning cutting-edge genetic science and physics, AIs, parrot-cats, cosmology, and the search for alien intelligence. Nice work. Also excellent in January is another strong novella, the curiously titled “Bruce Springsteen,” by Paul McAuley. One of his “Jackaroo” stories, taking place on an alien planet recently colonized by humans, First Foot, this is not so much a murder mystery as a grim crime story, starting out as a caper story and evolving into the story of a Charley Starkweather-like killing spree, with the dreams and doomed ambitions of the main characters as inevitable and bleakly ironic as those who feature in the Springstein songs the story references.

Also good, although not in the same league as the two above, is Jack McDevitt’s “Maiden Voyage,” an origin story that introduces Priscilla Hutchins, main character of McDevitt’s six popular “Academy” novels, which started with The Engines of God; this shows Hutchins on her, yes, maiden voyage, her first as a starship pilot, where she makes more than one unexpected discovery. C.W. Johnson’s “The Burst” matches a woman’s discovery of a new cosmological phenomenon with her lover’s discovery of an ominous lump in his testicle—low-key but absorbing, although why, in this near-future, it takes weeks and weeks to get the result of a “scan” of his testicle to find out whether or not he has cancer, I don’t really understand, since that could be determined more quickly today.

Everything below this level is less successful, although none of it is awful. In “Friendlessness,” new writer Eric Del Carlo takes us to one of those Facebook futures where everything’s networked and interconnected and you can rent friends—although it turns out that the best ones are ones that you’ve made on your own. New writer Katherine Marzinsky tells a too-sentimental story, haunted by the ghost of Wall-E, about a garbage-disposal robot who encounters something out of the parameters of its normal operating routine, in “Recyclable Material.” And in “The War is Over and Everyone Wins,” new writer Zachary Jernigan takes us to a Balkanized future America where all the white people have died (what a relief!) but racism persists nevertheless.

The February Asimov’s is weaker than the January issue, although it does feature another excellent novella, “Murder Born,” by Robert Reed, in which an enigmatic technology ensures that a murderer’s victims come back to life as soon as the killer is executed in a particular high-tech way. This is a compelling study of guilt and responsibility and the ways that families are torn apart and brought together by the murder or disappearance of a child, only slightly marred by the fact that it was possible to see the ending coming a fair way before you actually reached. Still, easily the best story in the issue.

Also good is “The People of Pele” by Ken Liu, a new writer who seems to be turning up everywhere these days—this is a rather old-fashioned but compassionate and psychologically complex study of the first colonizing voyage to an alien planet, one which reminds me rather strongly in fact of the late Edgar Pangborn’s 1953 novel of a similar expedition, West of the Sun…not inconsiderable praise, in my book. In “The Voodoo Project,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch tells an absorbing but perhaps a bit too convoluted story about a psychic involved in a vast clandestine war that even she doesn’t understand who has to deal with outliving her usefulness while on what turns out to be her final mission.

Stuff below this point is a bit weaker, and features several unusual collaborations. Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn join forces to tell the story of the “Hive Mind Man,” which is amusing, with some moments that are genuinely funny, but which also deals with subject matter I’ve seen Rucker cover several times lately: how the world becomes aware that everything is alive and interconnected. “Going Home,” by Bruce McAllister and Barry Malzberg, is a rather bitter bit of metafiction about science fiction and the perception of the future, with a Phil Dickian twist thrown in. New writer D. Thomas Minton’s “Observations on a Clock” is earnest, but also pretentious and a bit dull.

The January issue of the online magazine Clarkesworld also contains one of the best stories of the year to date, “Scattered Along the River of Heaven,” by Aliette de Bodard. This is the story of a rebellion against a totalitarian interstellar empire and its complicated and contradictory aftermath, told alternately from the points of view of the rebel who engineered the revolution and her granddaughter, who returns for her funeral after the revolution is won and the rebel has been sent into exile by rival political factions among the victors. This is a politically and psychological subtle story, quite intense, and bleakly lyrical in places—what it reminds me of most strongly is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Day After the Revolution,” a high complement, but de Bodard puts a cultural spin all her own on it. Also in January is “All the Painted Stars” by new writer Gwendolyn Clare, a pretty good story on its own, about an alien who is forced to throw in his lot with a group of humans and slowly becomes more human himself as he assimilates to them, but one that suffers unfairly in juxtaposition with the de Bodard, and “What Everyone Remembers,” by new writer Rahul Kanakia, about a genetically engineered superintelligent cockroach in a post-apocalyptic world, which suffers even more.