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Asimov’s, July.

Asimov’s, August.

Solaris Rising 1.5: An Exclusive ebook of New Science Fiction, ed. by Ian Whates. (Solaris, $3.43,153 pages.) Cover art by Pye Parr.

Tor.com, May 9.

Tor.com, July 4.

Tor.com, August 8.

 

The July issue of Asimov’s is a strong one. Best story here may be Megan Lindholm’s “Old Paint.” This will be too sentimental for some, but for those who are not provoked to sneering cynicism by a hint of human warmth, as modern culture sometimes seems to demand, this will prove to be an affecting study of the bonds of affection and the relationship that can form between a family and an inanimate object—especially when the object turns out to not be quite so inanimate after all. Also good in July is Allen M. Steele’s “Alive and Well, A Long Way From Anywhere,” the story of a reclusive billionaire who creates a refuge for himself that nobody else can reach inside a hollowed-out asteroid, and the wide-ranging consequences of that act; this comes across to me rather like a modern update of Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” “Long Night on Redrock,” by Felicity Shoulders, is an exciting story about children kidnapped by a slaver who carries them off across a hostile alien dessert, with the desperate parents in hot pursuit…but one which, unfortunately, bogs things down with long flashbacks to the past psychological traumas of the parents; the story is really that of the kidnapped little girl and should have stuck with her perspective, and, as she is appealingly level-headed and resourceful, allowed her to solve the problem and rescue her and her little brother herself.

The rest of the stuff here is not quite as strong, although still good. Robert Reed’s “The Girl in the Park” takes a look at a brain-damaged man who has been haunted with guilt his entire life about a crime that he might have been able to prevent but did not; toward the end, Reed throws in a bioengineering subtheme that comes in a bit too late to gell with the rest of the story. Michael Blumlein’s “Bird Walks in New England” is a sensitively written story about a birder whose relationship with her husband slowly falls apart, and who later sees a strange bird whom nobody else ever sees again, the sighting of which brings about at least a partial emotional reconciliation with husband; although there’s a thin rationalization that the bird might be an alien, it’s very thin, and the story really could be told without any fantastic element at all, substituting a rare or supposedly extinct bird for the mystery bird. Steven Utley’s “Zip” is about the dilemma of time-travelers being chased relentlessly back into the past by a wave of annihilation that they themselves might inadvertently be creating. In “Kill Switch,” new writer Benjamin Crowell takes us to a future where a bioengineered musician who has just had a sex change from female to male begins to question some of his lifestyle choices; the story isn’t really as much about gender roles, though, as about whether your Art—and your life—is enhanced or diminished by staying on your meds.

The August issue of Asimov’s isn’t quite as strong as July overall, but it does feature one of the best stories of the year so far, “Weep for Day,” by new writer Indrapramit Das; set on a tidally locked planet where the frozen and eternally dark Nightside is slowly being explored—and conquered—by explorers from the Dayside, this is an evocative, sensitively characterized, and lyrically written story that reminds me of something by Gene Wolfe, no faint praise in my book.

Nothing else here reaches the level of quality of the Das story, but there’s other good stuff. “Starsong,” by Aliette de Bodard, is another of her Xuya stories, set in a Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires; a prequel to her “Shipbirth,” from the February 2010 Asimov’s, this one deals with a young woman caught between the two worlds, and the psychological pressures that shape her in her attempt to become one of the pilots who interface with living spaceships. “The Bernoulli War,” by Gord Sellar, is a dense and chewy story about warring machine civilizations in a far future, both distantly descended from organic humans, and contains some sophisticated ideation, although naming characters things like “!pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAgic” and “!PHEnteRMinEm46g5@chiASMus” doesn’t make it the easiest story to read. Jason Sanford’s “Heaven’s Touch,” a more Analogish story than you usually run into here, is a well-told classic hard SF puzzle story about an astronaut stranded on a comet during a mission to divert the comet from striking Earth who must try to outwit the renegade AI system that sabotaged his mission in the first place and save the home planet from destruction. “Stamps,” by Bruce McAllister, is a sly look at how the Earth is saved from destruction by a more mundane thing—postage stamps, and the joy of collecting them. Former Asimov’s regular Ted Reynolds makes a welcome return after a 31-year absence (!) with “View Through the Window,” which is basically Rear Window set on an orbiting space station; nicely handled, although the lesson of tolerance the protagonist learns is a predictable one. Ian Creasey offers an entertaining but rather improbable look at bioengineered “flyers” of the future (no way balloons are keeping that floating city up there, and I’m not sure the way the flyers fly is really possible either) in “Joining the High Flyers.” And Theodora Goss gives us a deadpan satirical “scientific” paper that investigates the possibility that “Beautiful Boys” are actually an alien species.

An odd item is Solaris Rising 1.5: An Exclusive ebook of New Science Fiction, edited by Ian Whates, available only in ebook form, an original SF anthology designed to act as a “bridge” between 2010’s Solaris Rising and next year’s upcoming Solaris Rising 2 anthology—in other words, it’s a teaser or sampler or preview of the kind of fiction you can expect to find in Solaris Rising 2, put out there with the hope that if you like it, you’ll then buy the print anthology in 2013. Fortunately for this scheme, the overall literary quality here is pretty high. The best story here, by a substantial margin, is Adam Roberts’s “What Did Tessimond Tell You?”, in which a scientist attempts to unravel what seems at first like a minor mystery, but one that leads her step by step into a disturbing—in fact, dismaying—realization. Also good is Aliette de Bodard’s “Two Sisters in Exile,” although the plot, featuring a woman reluctantly attending the funeral of a political enemy, with vast political consequences attached, is a bit too similar to the author’s own “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” from the January Clarkesworld. Gareth L. Powell’s “Another Apocalypse” starts out as a exciting chase-and-intrigue story, one that leaves you wondering how in the world the protagonist is going to get out of this mess—but then another storyline altogether smushes into the story and takes it over, and the protagonist of that storyline effortlessly rescues the original protagonist with no effort or ingenuity on his part called for; disappointing, since it starts out very well. Paul Cornell’s “A New Arrival at the House of Love” deals with bored decadent posthumans so removed from you or I that they might as well be gods, and is reminiscent in tone of Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, with its cruel and playfully decadent far-future immortals, but unlike Moorcock, whose novels were written as Victorian pastiches, Cornell’s story is written in a fairly opaque manner that may be difficult for some readers to get into, and may deter some altogether; persistence will reward you with an interesting story, though. Paul Di Filippo’s “A Palazzo in the Stars” is an elegant steampunk retake on H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Sarah Lotz’s “Charlotte” is a variant of the old story about the lonely old woman whose life is changed for the better by bonding with a dog, who ultimately rescues her, except that the dog has been updated to being a giant robot spider instead. And Mike Resnick’s “The Second Civil War” isn’t really a story at all, but rather an (interesting) piece of Alternate History speculation, as though Resnick is laying out the groundwork for a story he hasn’t actually written yet.

As far as I can tell, Solaris Rising 1.5 is available only in a Kindle edition from Amazon. I searched the Solaris website, but could find no information about it there.

Tor.com has published two quirky and excellent fantasy stories in recent weeks, Michael Swanwick’s “The Mongolian Wizard” on July 1, and Pat Murphy’s “About Fairies,” on May 9th. “The Mongolian Wizard” is the start of a series about playing the Great Game of espionage in a vaguely Ruritanian pre-World War I Europe in which magic and magical creatures exist and the operatives have strange powers and abilities, somewhat similar to Charles Stross’s “Laundry” stories, but with a very different tone; like most of Swanwick’s work, it’s vivid and fun and cynical, with lots of double-crosses and double double-crosses on the page, all of which bodes well for future stories. Murphy’s “About Fairies” is a dark, elegant, and ultimately scary tale about the intrusion of fairies—fairies of a very different sort from the usual twinkly, gossamer-winged sort—into modern-day San Francisco, and a woman who comes to recognize the subtle, almost subliminal, signs of their presence.

Another good recent story in Tor.com is “Faster Gun,” by Elizabeth Bear, posted on August 8, an SF/western cross that is everything that the movie Cowboys and Aliens should have been, but was not. Bear does a particularly good job with the protagonist, Doc Holiday, getting inside the head of the consumptive gunslinger well enough to make him a sympathetic character that you come to care about, and even worry for when he runs into danger, even though you know perfectly well all the while that he has an appointment with the O.K. Corral waiting for him in the future.