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The New Yorker, June 4 & June 11.

Asimov’s, April/May.

Asimov’s, June.

Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas, by Robert Reed. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848633-12-4, 328 pages.) Cover art by Jim Burns.

 

As several people have already joked, Hell must have frozen over—because the double June 4 and June 11 issue of The New Yorker is a special “Science Fiction Issue,” something many of us, particularly the old hands, never expected to see in our lifetimes. For those of us used to decades of seeing SF kept out of literary mainstream markets like The New Yorker by a nearly impenetrable firewall, this comes as quite a surprise, although there have been indications for a couple of years now that things might be changing. Though, as a few reviewers have pointed out, things perhaps haven’t changed all that much—rather than using authors more centrally identified with the genre, the authors contributing fiction here are all authors who would be familiar to The New Yorker’s audience, most of whom have appeared in the magazine several times before, and most of the stories here are somewhat slipstreamish, to greater or lesser degree, at a considerable distance from core SF; you’ll find no hard science here, or off-world stories, or far-future stuff, or tales featuring aliens or spaceships or AIs or clones or talking space squids. Still, it’s a start. Who knows what a few more years may bring?

The best story here, by a substantial margin, is Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box,” which would be a straight spy story, although a good one, except for the intriguing way it which it is written—I’ve heard it said that it’s written in Twitter posts, but it seems to me more as if it’s written in the form of the spy’s running advice to herself during the mission, or, considering the title, which references the “black box” recovered from the wreckage of a plane crash to tell investigators what went wrong, more probably her advice to other spies who may someday attempt similar missions, left behind after her death; the thing it reminds me the most of, in fact, to resort to a lowbrow reference, is the spy’s running voiceover commentary on the TV show Burn Notice. Junot Diaz’s “Monstro” is another intriguing story, although it can’t seem to make up its mind what kind of story it is, starting off as a story about a mysterious plague that breaks out in a Haitian refugee camp, mixing in a story of unrequited love, and then morphing into a story about survivors watching an enigmatic catastrophe, reminiscent of Cloverfield. The story ends just as it’s starting to become the most interesting, with everything unresolved, something they probably wouldn’t have let Diaz get away with in Asimov’s or F&SF.

In addition to fiction, the issue also contains short essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, China Mieville, and the late Ray Bradbury, as well as an article about aliens in fiction by Laura Miller, and even reviews of genre TV shows such as Doctor Who—there are no reviews of SF books, though, perhaps an indication that Hell hasn’t frozen quite all the way to the bottom.

Meanwhile, back in the heart of the genre, the April/May issue of Asimov’s is a strong one. Best story here is probably James Patrick Kelly’s novella “The Last Judgment,” a direct sequel to his “Men Are Trouble” from all the way back in the June 2004 Asimov’s, taking us down some Mean Streets in company with a Private Eye in a bizarre future where aliens with godlike powers have made all the men in the world disappear, apparently on some strange whim, leaving human existence as we now know it has been turned completely on its head, and forcing the women left behind to forge a new society on their own. Kelly handles the noir PI element smoothly and well, although there’s probably nothing about the case itself that’s going to baffle regular mystery fans; the real strength of the story comes from the glimpses of the workings of the society that has evolved in the total absence of men, and the hints about the possible (and possibly changing) motivations of the aliens that come across during the course of the investigation. Also first-rate is Tom Purdom’s “Bonding With Morry,” another in a long line of stories in which humans form emotional bonds with robot caretakers—or think that they are, anyway. Purdom never really settles the issue of whether his clear-eyed and hard-headed senior has really become attached to his robot nurse and housekeeper, but seems to say that even half-fooling yourself by pretending that you have is a good thing for a lonely man at the end of his life.

In the suspenseful “Something Real,” Rick Wilber takes real-life baseball player Moe Berg on a secret World War II mission to assassinate Werner Heisenberg before he can produce an atomic bomb for Hitler—something that was actually considered in our own timeline—but the mission grows more complicated when he crosses paths with a woman who seemingly has the power to move between Alternate Realities—and take him with her. “Living in the Eighties,” by David Ira Cleary is another complex time-travel tale, one drenched with ‘80s nostalgia, but since I have no ‘80s nostalgia, it didn’t work well for me; if you do have it, your mileage may vary. Ian Creasey’s “Souvenirs” deals with the aftermath of a minor crime in a bustling spaceport where lots of different alien races rub elbows (or whatever it is they have)—and I must say, sadly, that the police and government agencies in this society take the wild claims of an indigent street-dweller much more seriously than would probably be the case in ours, and treat her with much more consideration than she’d probably receive today, where she’d most likely be ignored or thrown out of the police station on her ass. In Sandra McDonald’s “Sexy Robot Mom,” a doggedly loyal robot surrogate mother is determined to bring the fetus implanted within her to term and deliver it successfully to its parents, in spite of the interruption of decades of unintentional cryogenic slumber, a societal collapse, and what appears to be the arrival of a new Ice Age, to say nothing of the fact that the parents are almost certainly dead; the robot is so single-mindedly set on its task in the face of all odds that it becomes almost endearing after awhile, although the whole situation is pretty unlikely, and the story really needs a resolution of whether “she” succeeds or not. New writer Gray Rinehart tells a fast-paced but even more unlikely story in “Sensitive, Compartmented,” in which a telepath is sent off in a superfast spy plane to spy on the territories below, gets shot down, and ends up being captured by a boatload of rather caricatured Russians, one of whom happens to be a telepath like herself. New writer Josh Roseman’s “Greener” gains little or nothing from being set in the near-future and told as an SF story rather than as a straight mainstream story.

The June Asimov’s is considerably weaker, with nothing that really stands out. There’s decent work here by Mercurio D. Rivera, Will McIntosh, Megan Arkenberg, Jack McDevitt, Alan DeNiro, Kali Wallace, and Bud Sparhawk—solid stuff, but none of it really first-rate, and I suspect that none of it will be showing up on next year’s award ballots. Most entertaining story here is probably Bruce McAllister’s “Free Range,” which is told in a calm and mellow enough voice to keep you from quite noticing, while you’re reading it, anyway, just how silly this tale of Magic Guardian Chickens that protect you from Killer Owls From Outer Space actually is.

I remain puzzled as to why Robert Reed isn’t more famous than he is, in spite of the fact that he’s consistently produced four or five (at least) of the year’s best stories year after year now for almost twenty years, usually appearing in several of that year’s various Best of the Year anthologies, and sometimes in all of them at the same time. You’d think by now that he’d be a household name, but although he did win a Hugo a few years back—he’s not. Perhaps it’s because his best work is done in short fiction, not at novel length, and novels are where the real reputation-building is going on these days. Perhaps it’s because his stories are often so different from each other in tone and execution and subject matter and genre that you can’t form a picture of what a “typical Robert Reed story” is going to be like, and that hampers the creation of a brand-identity—and so, name recognition (a problem he shares with Walter Jon Williams, and a couple of other good writers).

For those of us in the know, however, a new Robert Reed collection is cause for celebration. And that’s especially true of Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas, by Robert Reed, as it contains a major new novella by Reed, certainly one of the year’s best to date, the eponymous “Eater-of-Bone” The novella is related to Reed’s long-running series of stories about the “Great Ship,” a Jupiter-sized spaceship created eons ago by enigmatic aliens that endlessly travels the Galaxy with its freight of millions of passengers from dozens of races, including humans. In this story, set at a tangent to the main “Great Ship” sequence, human colonists from the Ship have crashed and been marooned on a planet inhabited by smaller, weaker aliens. Because of their comparatively greater size and strength, and because of the repair nanomechanisms in their blood which make them effectively immortal, or at least very, very hard to kill, the natives see them as monsters, and over hundreds of years, their relationship with humans has evolved into a state of constant warfare. To the surviving humans, though, the real monsters are other humans, and, trapped in this resource-poor world, they constantly war with each other as well, in competition for what resources there are. This is a complex, chewy, and often emotionally draining story, which begins with as tense and exciting an extended chase scene as I’ve ever read, fourteen pages of grueling flight-and-fight, as a lone human woman is battered and injured in the course of her headlong flight, fights her way on against all odds, is mutilated and torn almost to pieces, and finally killed—for the moment. And that’s just the beginning, with another hundred some pages, and many twists, turns, and surprises, to go!

The collection also contains three other novellas: the complex time-travel story “Veritas,” in which an army invades and transforms Ancient Rome as we know it; the intellectual cat-and-mouse game of “Truth,” in which an interrogator questioning a prisoner finds truth to be a very difficult thing indeed to pin down; and Reed’s Hugo-winner, “A Billion Eves,” in which young men headed off to create their own pocket universes routinely kidnap young women to take along with them.