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F&SF, July/August.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, ed. By David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman. (Tachyon, 978161690698, $15.95, 480 pages.) Cover art by Jean-Sebastien Rossbach.

Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, ed. By James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-070-4, $15.95, 431 pages.) Cover design by Josh Beatman.

Arc 1.2.

 

The July/August issue of F&SF is a strong one, after a couple of weaker issues. The best story here is probably “Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls,” by Rachel Pollack, a vividly written and emotionally powerful story about a man who travels between our world and an eerie Afterlife world to bring messages from the living to the recently departed (the story also contains a shout-out to old farts like me who have been around long enough to remember another morally ambiguous traveler-for-hire whose business card consisted only of his name and the silhouette of a chess piece knight). This is an unusually imaginative fantasy, far different from the standard product, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it on some award ballots next year.

Nothing else here quite comes up to this level, but there is lots of other good stuff. Kate Wilhelm unravels an attempt by—of course; it’s a Wilhelm story—an evil corporation to control, manipulate, and even breed people who can see a short distance into the future in “The Fullness of Time.” Eleanor Arnason offers us a sly fable supposedly told by a member of the alien hwarhath people in “The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times.” Prolific new writer Ken Liu—who seems to be everywhere these days—explores the unfortunate consequences of a technology devised to level the racial playing-field in “Real Faces” (a story that reminds me a bit of Michael Bishop’s “Saving Face” from some years back). Jeffery Ford, who sometimes works on the edge (or beyond) of slipstream, tells a straightforward and chilling Japanese ghost story in “A Natural History of Autumn.” F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey—I don’t think he’s ever been published in any other market—tells another, less frightening, ghost story (of a sort) in “Harmut’s World,” robustly entertaining as always, although the solution to their problem is so obvious that it stretches credulity a bit that it takes them as long to think of it as it does. Matthew Johnson’s “The Afflicted” manages to work up an emotional charge and some real suspense, and although when all is said and done, it’s basically just another zombie story, at least it’s a well-told one. New writer Michaele Jordon contributes “Wizard,” a quirky little fantasy about a young girl who becomes fascinated by—“charmed,” in the old sense of the word—a sinister older man, with results a bit more complicated than the being dumped in a roadside ditch or held prisoner in a basement for ten years which are the fates that often await such girls in the real world.

Next to the Pollack, my favorite story of the issue is Matthew Hughes’s “Wearaway and Flambeau,” not as original a fantasy, but almost as entertaining—at least if you like Sword & Sorcery (which not everyone does). A fast-paced tale about the master thief Raffalon, a wily rogue who is forced to make an attempt to steal a magical item from a powerful wizard—with results that surprise everyone, even the wizard; perhaps especially the wizard. It’s no secret that Hughes has been heavily influenced by Jack Vance, whose style and tone he has frequently and successfully (and admittedly) pastiched, and that he’s been especially influenced by Vance’s The Dying Earth stories, and it’s obvious that Raffalon owes a clear debt to Vance’s roguish antihero Cugel the Clever—but where part of Vance’s joke is that Cugel is nowhere near as clever as he thinks that he is, Raffalon really is quick-witted and resourceful, and manages to turn the tables on his enemies in ways that are unexpected, and, yes, clever. This is just the first of a projected series about the adventures of Raffalon, good news for Sword & Sorcery fans.

For those not familiar with Sword & Sorcery, a good place to start might be The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman. This big reprint anthology provides a historical overview of the Sword & Sorcery subgenre (although I’m mildly disappointed there’s nothing by Jack Vance here), from its beginnings in the Weird Tales of the 1930s up to the present day, with original stories by Michael Swanwick and Michael Shea. Unsurprisingly, the best stories are the classics:  Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant,” C.L Moore’s “Black God’s Kiss,” Fritz Leiber’s “The Unholy Grail,” Poul Anderson’s “The Tale of Hauk,” Michael Moorcock’s “The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams,” Joanna Russ’s “The Adventuress.” Some of the more recent stories seem solidly on the line of development for the subgenre, such as Glen Cook’s “Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted with Defeat” and Rachel Pollack’s “The Red Guild,” but as we get nearer the present, many of them get an admixture of slipstream to one extent or another, and I was sorry that the anthology didn’t progress from its historical roots into what has been called “The New Sword & Sorcery”—I would have liked to see stories here from people like Joe Abercrombie, K.J. Parker, Scott Lynch, Steven Erikson, Garth Nix, or James Enge, the heirs of the form. Toward the end of the book we come across George R.R. Martin’s excellent novella “Path of the Dragon,” one of those stories that makes categorization difficult; its roots in classical Sword & Sorcery are obvious, with the influence of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance particularly clear, and it’s got swords, and sorcery, but somehow it feels more like Epic Fantasy or Heroic Fantasy than Sword & Sorcery. I’ll leave it to more astute critics than I to parse the difference.

From imaginary pasts, let’s catapult to imaginary futures. The Posthuman/Singularity story was never quite cohesive enough to function as a subgenre all its own, but there were lots of them throughout the ‘90s and the Oughts, including some of the best work of those periods, and the form is still very much an important part of the current SF scene today. Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, a reprint anthology, does a good job of providing a historical overview of the Posthuman/Singularity form, taking us from an excerpt from Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John in 1935, through perhaps the first modern post-human story, Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million,” in 1966, through the cyberpunk days of the ‘80s, represented here by Bruce Sterling’s “Sunken Gardens,” and on through the rich harvest of such stories from the ‘90s and Oughts to the present. The best stories here, other than those already mentioned, are probably Charles Stross’s “Nightfall,” Greg Egan’s “Crystal Nights,” Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “True Names,” Robert Reed’s “Coelacanths,” Justina Robson’s “Cracklegrackle,” and Hannu Rajaniemi’s “The Server and the Dragon.”  The anthology also contains a reprint of Vernor Vinge’s seminal essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” an immensely influential bit of speculation that set many of the concerns and shaped much of the content of this kind of story, and which popularized the term “Singularity” itself; there are also speculative essays by Ray Kurzweil and J.D. Bernal, and other stories by Isaac Asimov, Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth Bear, David D. Levine, and Vinge himself.

For another look at possible futures, plus some sideways glances at the odd corners of the world we already live in, let’s turn to Arc 1.2, the follow-up to Arc 1.1, which was released in the Spring. Put together by the makers of Scientific American magazine, and described as “a new digital magazine about the future,” Arc, edited by Simon Ings and Sumit Paul-Choudhury, exists mainly as various downloadable formats for the Kindle, the iPad, iPhones, Windows PC and Mac computers, orderable either from Amazon or directly from www.newscientist.com/arc (although they will send you a perfect-bound 152-page print version for $29.95; since the Kindle edition costs only $6.99, you’re probably better off with an electronic format). Like the premier issue, Arc 1.2 is a mix of fiction with intelligent, quirky non-fiction essays and criticism by people such as Frederik Pohl, Gord Sellar, Simon Ings and Sonja Vesterholt, P.D. Smith, Holly Granazio, and Ann Galloway and Sumit Paul-Choudhury on varied topics ranging from the history of futurology, why the fun that can be had in cities is one of the major reasons for their existence, the ways that astronauts will need to entertain themselves in space, the peculiar mix of the future and the ancient past in South Korea, to the search for a pioneering Soviet film-maker known as “the Red Kubrick.” As with the previous issue, there’s a good deal more non-fiction than fiction here, giving it more the feel of a future-oriented popular science magazine such as (unsurprisingly) Scientific American with some SF stories added than an SF magazine per se, but what fiction there is here is also intelligent and quirky. The best of them, and one of the best stories of the year so far, is “The Man,” by Paul McAuley, a story set off at a bit of a tangent to McAuley’s “Jackeroo” series, where humanity has been gifted with a number of sub-standard worlds to colonize by an enigmatic alien species who probably have agendas of their own. This story takes us to a newly-settled colony world, a bleak and somewhat insalubrious place we haven’t visited before in the series, and introduces us to a tough-minded old woman who lives by herself in the depths of a hostile alien forest, making a precarious living scavenging artifacts left over from a previous failed colony attempt by an unknown race millennia before, and who one stormy night finds a mysterious stranger seeking refuge at her door—one who looks human, but, as soon becomes obvious, is clearly not, and who has no memory of his origin. The woman’s efforts to unravel the mystery of where he came from and what he is, and the peculiar relationship that slowly evolves between them, makes for compelling, and ultimately rather poignant, reading. In “Komodo,” Jeff VanderMeer takes us on a wild adventure through time and space, by a woman recruited by enigmatic, godlike creatures from her timeline moments before what would have been her death (in a matter reminiscent of Fritz Leiber’s “Change War” stories) and sent out on a mission she doesn’t entirely understand; it’s a bit difficult to follow what’s going on in the opening couple of pages, but if you stick with it, the story rewards persistence. Nick Harkaway’s “Attenuation” gives us a man caught between two bodies in a failed attempt at teleportation who must go to desperate lengths to track down and dispose of his original body, which was supposed to have been destroyed in the process, before the copy body he’s occupying now can die of “Attenuation Effect,” in an entertaining story with faint echoes of both Keith Brooke’s “Imago” and James Patrick Kelly’s classic “Think Like a Dinosaur.” T.D. Edge’s “Big Dave’s in Love” depicts a future world nearly destroyed by a somewhat surreal disaster, and deals with an effort by sentient toys to get two of the few remaining humans to mate, so that it comes across rather like Toy Story told as a Post-Apocalyptic Romance.

Let’s hope this continues as a series, as it’s been of encouragingly high-quality so far, although, being who I am, I can’t help but want there to be more fiction in the issues.