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F&SF, March/April

Asimov’s, March

Tor.com, February 29-March 21.

 

The March/April F&SF has several pleasant stories in it, although nothing really major. Peter S. Beagle tells us about a larcenous although fairly harmless con man who must flee the sophisticated mercantile city of Utrecht for a life of lonely exile in a remote Puritan village in the New World, where he has a strange encounter with primal forces in the deep woods, in the leisurely but enjoyable tale of what happens during “Olfert Dapper’s Day.” Sean McMullen whips up a more energetic Steampunk Gothic, set against a background of the Napoleonic Wars, in “Electrica,” which comes complete with dashing Army officers, duels, spies, Semaphore towers flashing coded messages, brooding Gothic mansions, mad scientists, seductresses in filmy gowns, sinister ravens, heads in bottles (sort of), and even the threat of a Lovecraftian Incursion. Albert E. Cowdrey tells one of the gonzo farces he seems to have been specializing in lately in “Greed,” in which an ambitious, venal man reluctantly running a small-town tourist-attraction castle with a real monster (sort of) in it seizes what he sees as his opportunity to make his fortune and get the hell out of Bonaparte, Mississippi for good—it all goes wrong, of course, in a biter-bit sort of way, but there’s a good-natured air to the story, and, with only a couple of exceptions, the consequences are not too dire for anybody, even for the schemer (although, ending up stuck just where he started, he might disagree with me). In “One Year of Fame,” Robert Reed gives us what essentially is a Writer’s Joke, about a reclusive small-town author whose work becomes immensely popular with robots, causing all sorts of comic complications in the life both of the author and of the town. Steven Utley’s “The Tortoise Grows Elate” is the latest in his string of “Silurian Tales,” dealing with time-traveling scientists in a prehistoric era, one of the longest-running series in SF; like them all, this is finely crafted, but like many of them, has a very small fantastic element—except for the fact that it’s taking place in the past, it could just as easily be told as a mainstream story, with little real change needed.

Most of the stories in this issue are fairly light, not meant to be taken terribly seriously; the exception is Michael Blumlein’s “Twenty-Two and You,” a somber story of a young woman faced with the near-certainty that getting pregnant will give her cancer, and the lengths to which she’s willing to go to avoid that fate—there’s an ironic twist at the end, one that reminds me of John Kessel’s “Clean” from the March 2011 Asimov’s, and which asks, just how much are you willing to give up for a cure? Tim Sullivan’s “Repairman” begins with a fairly bleak setup, a distraught woman whose lover has just committed suicide, but things are not as they seem, and this turns out to be hopeful rather than depressing. We’re back to light-hearted with Richard Bowes’s “The Queen and the Cambion,” in which Queen Victoria meets Merlin, and with Geoffrey Landis’s “Demiurge,” which is basically a Shaggy God joke. C.S. Friedman and KJ Kabza tell stories reminiscent of Galaxy-era-style satire from the ‘50s, which makes them feel rather dated to me, and Robert Walton and Barry N. Malzberg tell a familiar but enjoyable story about time-travelers going back and messing around with Mozart.

The best story in the March Asimov’s is probably Tom Purdom’s “Golva’s Ascent,” which is an old-fashioned off-planet adventure of a sort rarely seen these days, when many writers prefer instead to write apocalyptic future dystopias where ragged survivors live in abandoned cars while toasting dogs over a campfire for their supper. This is a sequel to Purdom’s novel The Tree Lord of Imetan from all the way back in 1966, and also to a recent Asimov’s story, “Warfriends,” from the December 2010 issue, although you don’t have to have read either to appreciate this story. It takes place on a distant planet which humans are making the first tentative efforts to colonize, and where a human refugee from the politically oppressive colony has escaped into the planet-girdling forest and forged an unlikely alliance between warring alien races and natural enemies, the cat-like, ground-dwelling, and linguistically sophisticated itiji, who are handless and possess no technology, and the warlike, arboreal tree people, who possess both hands and moderately sophisticated technology. “Golva’s Ascent” tells the story of an adventurous itiji who dares to climb up the fearsome cliffs that separate the human colony from the rest of the planet below and is captured and held prisoner by the humans, who have no idea that he’s a sentient being. How he forges a relationship and eventually an uneasy alliance with one of his human captors, with a canny insight into the psychological mindset and motivations of both species, and his subsequent hairsbreadth attempts to escape, make for a vigorous and suspenseful tale, a straightforward adventure story of a sort that we could use more of in a genre that sometimes seems to have forgotten that reading is supposed to be fun.

Also good here is “Patagonia,” by new writer Joel Richards, where a man journeys to one of the most remote places on Earth, only to discover that he might have been there before—in another life. “Mrs. Hatcher’s Evaluation,” by James Van Pelt, is mostly a thinly-disguised excuse for a critique of what’s wrong with modern education, a subject Van Pelt, a teacher himself, knows well, as an administrator looking for cuts to make tries to figure out why a teacher who does everything wrong according to modern educational theory is the most effective teacher in the school; turns out the teacher has some minor and never explained supernatural help, but this could have as easily been told as a mainstream story about a history teacher who really made the past come alive, in a figurative rather than a literal sense, for her students. New writer Benjamin Crowell’s “The Pass” does a fairly good job of handling a future I’ve already grown tired of, the one where almost everybody on Earth has been uploaded into a Virtual Reality surround, leaving the planet largely empty of human life, with the cities crumbling into decay and hold-outs forced to make a living by scavenging and hunting, although it does no better than most of them in rationalizing how such a system could possibly work, or survive for long with the physical support infrastructure of civilization collapsed behind it. In “Nanny’s Day,” new writer Leah Cypess takes a look at a near-future I find extremely unlikely, one in which courts are willing to grant custody of children to their nannies in preference to their parents; not going to happen, I feel, being against basic human nature, no matter how many examples of bad parenting crop up in coming years. In recent columns, I’ve been discussing science fiction stories that are disguised as fantasy; in “The Way of the Needle,” new writer Derek Künsken gives us exactly the opposite, fantasy disguised as science fiction, telling what is essentially a medieval court intrigue which here is being played out by “prickly metal creatures” who somehow, impossibly, have evolved and created a civilization on a planet after its crust and mantle have been stripped away by a supernova.

Throughout March, Tor.com has been running a series of five stories, commissioned by David G. Hartwell, and all inspired by a painting by John Jude Palencar, a practice that was once standard for pulp SF magazines, but which hasn’t been seen much in recent years. The stories are “New World Blues,” by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., posted on February 29th, “Dormanna,” by Gene Wolfe, posted on March 7th, “Thantos Beach,” by James Morrow, posted on March 14th, “The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree,” by Michael Swanwick, posted on March 21st, and “The Sigma Structure Symphony,” by Gregory Benford, posted on March 28th. With only a couple of possible exceptions, there are probably no award-finalists here, but the stories are all entertaining in their own different ways, and, as always with this kind of exercise (John W. Campbell was once quoted as saying that it was no problem giving the same story idea to five different authors, because he knew he’d get back five different stories), it’s interesting to see the different tacks the authors take to rationalize the scene in Palencar’s painting, which shows a woman in old-fashioned dress standing beneath a sky that writhes with huge overarching branches or tentacles.

The attempts to explain the scene in the illustration range from relatively hard SF to science-fantasy to satirical slipstream; naturally enough, considering my preference for core science fiction, I like the core SF stories the best. The best story in the sequence is Michael Swanwick’s “The Woman Who Shook the World Tree,” in which attempts to develop a new theory of what time actually is leads to tragic results; Swanwick’s story of obsessive doomed love is also the one of the group that packs the most emotional impact, by a good margin. Benford’s story takes us to the far-future SETI Library, which stores all the messages from the stars we’ve received over hundreds of years, a setting he’s used before, for a warning that if you stare into the Abyss, or into a virtual structure made up of enigmatic alien messages, the Abyss may also stare back into you. It’s interesting that both Swanwick and Benford chose reclusive (bordering on autistic) and lonely female mathematical geniuses for their protagonists. Gene Wolfe, unsurprisingly, tells a sly, tricksy story which is told in the voice of a child’s fantasy, but which ultimately turns out to be SF, about alien (explorers? scientists? envoys?) investigating (and, it is hinting, evaluating or even judging) our Earth. Benford, Wolfe, and Modesitt put the most effort into including a visualization of the overarching sky-tree of Palencar’s painting, Benford interpreting it as a depiction of streams of alien mathematical data in a Virtual Surround, Wolfe as a glimpse of the scattered units of his alien or aliens reassembling themselves into one entity before vanishing, and Modesitt, less convincingly, as a sort of Flying Spaghetti Monster who is the literal god of an alternate universe. Modesitt and Benford put the most effort into explaining why the woman in Palencar’s painting is wearing old-fashioned clothing, like something a Nineteenth Century frontier woman would wear (rather like, it just strikes me, the clothing worn in Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting Christina’s World). Swanwick and Morrow don’t really bother to include a literalization of the scene at all, pretty much, and so the issue of why the woman is wearing old-fashioned clothing never comes up.