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F&SF, May/June.

Interzone 239.

Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr., by Neal Barrett, Jr. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-406-5, $40.00, 560 pages.) Cover art by Vincent Chong.

 

The May/June issue of F&SF is somewhat weak, with several pleasant stories, but nothing that’s going to be appearing on any award ballots—although there is more science fiction and less fantasy here than there usually is. One of the most enjoyable stories here is “Liberty’s Daughter,” by Naomi Kritzer, which involves a young girl “PI” (of sorts) who tracks down hard-to-find items down for a living who takes on a commission to find a missing indentured servant in a rather Libertarian offshore “nation” made up of linked floating ships, a commission that leads her into much more dangerous territory than she initially thinks that it will. There’s a pleasant air to this, rather like what a Nancy Drew novel might be like if it was written by the Robert A. Heinlein of his “juvenile novels” period, and, since it stops with large plot-points left up in the air, I assume that there’s going to be a sequel or sequels. There’s a similar YA feel, a bit less Heinleinesque, to Chris Willrich’s “Grand Tour,” an enjoyable read about a young girl in an affluent future society trying to come to terms with her issues with her family before setting off on a Grand Tour of the nations of Earth while her family simultaneously sets off on a Wanderjahr to another planet, a journey that will keep them apart for more than a decade. Although considerably grimmer in tone than either of the stories above, there’s a also a YA feel to Michael Alexander’s “The Children’s Crusade,” narrated by a young man in an impoverished and religiously intolerant rural farming community where food is scarce and the level of technology has been falling for generations, and his life-changing encounter with a Mysterious Stranger from elsewhere who turns out to know the secrets of the true origins of their world, and who can offer the narrator a possible way out, if he has the courage to take a chance on it.

Also amusing here is Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Asylum,” another of his stories exploring the supernatural side of New Orleans, in which a personable but hapless young man, a bit of a naif, actually, almost a James Thurber character, finds that he enjoys the company of ghosts much more than the more prickly, demanding company of the living. In “Typhoid Jack,” new writer Andy Stewart offers a look at the life of a supposedly street-smart virus-peddler (although he’d have to be rather dumb to not see through the trap he runs into) in a future where things are run for us for our own good by a race of intelligent and ruthlessly efficient androids, and the only way to get some time off is to buy a day’s worth of sickness on the street. New writer Matthew Corradi’s “City League” tells a baseball-oriented story about a man who comes to doubt his memories of the Big Game in a future where memories can be bought and sold, and new writer Pat MacEwen’s “Taking the Low Road” is a somewhat unlikely Space Opera about immigrants allowing themselves to be swallowed by the cosmic Space Worms who travel through the universe’s wormholes in order to be instantly transferred to a new home world…although things, of course, go drastically wrong. I’ve never really warmed to Fred Chappell’s long “shadow master” fantasy series, but for those who have, there’s a novella in the series here, “Maze of Shadows.”

The March/April issue of Interzone, Interzone 239, makes for rather glum reading. The best story here is also, probably not coincidentally, the least bleak: new writer Suzanne Palmer’s “Tangerine, Nectarine, Clementine, Apocalypse,” about a boy living on a highly regimented totalitarian space station—which calls itself “Utopia” and likes to think of itself as benign—whose old life is suddenly wiped away and who is forced to take a leap into the unknown to find a new and hopefully better life for himself somewhere else. Like her previous Interzone story, “The Ceiling Is Sky,” from last year’s Interzone 234, the initial setup is glum enough, but there’s real affection between the apprentice and his master to cut that a bit, and the story at least lets the protagonist break out of it at the end to achieve at least the possibility of attaining a better life, unlike most of the rest of the stories here. (It’s still unclear to me, though, how the killer nanobots came to be in the pomelo in the first place.)

New writer Matthew Cook’s “Railriders” is too much of a one-to-one translation of the concept of rail-riding hobos, translating them instead, not entirely convincingly, to destitute stowaways aboard interstellar spacecraft. Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Twember” is a melancholy tale about a man struggling to resolve family issues in the midst of an enigmatic and probably world-ending apocalypse involving unstoppable “time storms” that nobody knows the origin of, closer really, in its lack even of speculation about the origin of the storms, to horror than SF. Nigel Brown’s “One-Way Ticket” is another melancholy story about a party of terminally ill humans who are making their way on pilgrimage to an alien holy place where the prospect of a life after death, of sorts, is being held out to them, and a dying reporter who intends to pierce the veil of mystery about what really happens there and report the truth back to the rest of the universe, but who instead decides not to do it because that might spoil the possibility of solace that others might find there. New writer Jon Wallace’s “Lips & Teeth” involves a prisoner with strange abilities who is kept in confinement in a prison camp in some future totalitarian, vaguely Asian, realm, one who has been imprisoned for so long that he’s no longer sure that he wants to escape; a talking, sentient pickaxe is introduced as a character, but its existence is never explained. New writer Jacob A. Boyd’s “Bound in Place” takes us to a curious fantasy world where ghosts are used as household-running AIs and even everyday household appliances; like the bulk of the stuff in this issue, it’s also rather depressing.

Back in the mid-’80s, when I was editing Asimov’s magazine, I pulled an unagented manuscript by a writer whose name I didn’t recognize out of the slush pile. It was a sloppy, badly typed manuscript, usually an indicator that the story is the work of a novice, but there was something compelling about the voice it was written in, and I continued to read until I hit a scene where, in describing the wonders of New York City, the narration casually mentions in passing “a boy tying celery to a cat,” and I realized that I was no longer sure whether the author was a brilliant satirist or totally insane, and went off to seek a second opinion. Of course, it turned out that that author, Neal Barrett, Jr., was a brilliant satirist, perhaps the best in SF, and was also a veteran author who made his first sale way back in 1960 and who had written westerns, mysteries, thrillers, and historical fiction in addition to a number of SF novels; that story containing the no-doubt rather annoyed cat with celery tied to it was “Perpetuity Blues,” which still strikes me as one of the funniest (and weirdest) SF stories ever written, rivaling some of the best work of that other great SF humorist, R.A. Lafferty. Although he’d been writing for decades before then, Barrett really began to generate a buzz in the late ‘80s with the sudden massed appearance of a number of mad, highly energetic stories in markets such as Asimov’s and Omni, so that the affect was almost that of a major new writer appearing in our midst.

Most of the best of those stories are collected in the well-named Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr, which will certainly make my shortlist of the best collections of the year. Like Andy Duncan, who we were talking about here last month, like R.A. Lafferty, like Avram Davidson, like Howard Waldrop, Barrett is one of the great Eccentrics, absolutely unique writers whose work doesn’t really fit well into the mainline of development for either science fiction or fantasy, but which frequently and freely mingles elements of both, as well as generous handfuls of other genres, western, mystery, horror, whatever’s to hand in the writer’s kitchen that day. Barrett is probably best-known for developing what I think of as the Gonzo Apocalypse story—stories set in a grim post-Apocalyptic landscape that at the same time contains a large number of wildly improbable, madly surreal, and often very funny elements—in stories such as “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” (which centers around a robot hooker and a seven-foot-tall mutated possum with a machine gun) and “Radio Station St. Jack,” and in novels such as Through Darkest America, but, like Andy Duncan, he actually has a much wider range stylistically than that, as testified to here by poignant and autumnal stories such as “Sallie C.” and “Winter on the Belle Fourche,” which are also early examples of the Alternate History form before that subgenre really got rolling. But many of his stories are just flat-out weird, like the indescribable “Stairs,” which can make a good claim to the title of strangest science fiction story ever written—although the aforementioned “Perpetuity Blues,” “Highbrow” (which features the generations-long building of a mountain-high statue of Richard Nixon), “Cush,” and “The Last Cardinal Bird in Tennessee” could certainly give it a run for its money.

Barrett’s work won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you like vivid, unique, quirky, strong-flavored stuff that’s unlike anything that anybody has ever written before or ever will write again, then this collection belongs in your library.