49

F&SF, September/October

Asimov’s, September.

Asimov’s, October/November.

Interzone 241.

 

The best story in the September/October F&SF is a reprint of Andy Duncan’s “Close Encounters,” which I reviewed in the June Locus, following its original appearance in Duncan’s collection The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. Next best is recent Hugo and Nebula-winner Ken Liu’s “Arc,” a well-written and sensitive character study (although one which may be a bit slow for some readers) of a woman’s difficult journey through a long life to the point where she’s a respected and effectively immortal artist, when she is faced with the decision whether to go on living or not. This is a story obviously written by someone who’s young, one in which the woman makes the decision that she does based on philosophical musings about symmetry and the idea that “death gives life meaning”; those of us who can see the Grim Reaper coming up all too clearly in the rearview mirror would probably agree with the woman’s daughter instead, whose arguments for living seem a lot more sensible to me. Also good here is Peter Dickinson’s “Troll Blood,” in which a young woman who may have a troll in the genetic woodpile somewhere back in the far past must deal with the potentially fatal consequences of a present-day visitation by one of her distant relatives.

Everything else here is somewhat weaker.  “The Goddess,” by F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey, is an antebellum soap-opera about another young person’s long and difficult journey through life to ultimate success, this one a young Hindu trying to make his way in the racist society of pre-Civil War Mississippi; this is entertaining and engagingly written, as is almost everything by Cowdrey, but the fantastic element (other than the idea of a Hindu being able to survive and prosper in pre-Civil War Mississippi) is minimal. Michael Alexander also invokes the Civil War in “A Diary From Deimos,” but this story about a future revolution on Mars suffers from being too much of a one-on-one translation of our own Civil War, down to the mistake of even calling the diarist “Mrs. Chestnut.” Rand B. Lee offers a somewhat murky look at futuristic therapy in “Theobroma Valentine,” which might be a bit hard to parse if you’re not already familiar with his long-running series of stories about the alien Damanakippith/fu. Chet Arthur relates a Weird Western in “The Sheriff.” And Grania Davis takes us back to Old California for a tale about the Trickster contending with a padre in “Father Juniper’s Journey to the North.”

The September Asimov’s is a somewhat weak issue, with some solid work in it, but nothing really exceptional. The strongest story here is undoubtedly Robert Reed’s “Noumenon,” another in his long-running “Great Ship” series, about a Jupiter-sized spaceship that endlessly travels the Galaxy with millions of passengers from many different races, including humans. This one is ingenious and inventive, as always, but it sets up an intriguing situation that, to my mind, it doesn’t really resolve, as if it’s actually the opening for a much longer story; perhaps Reed is saving the resolution to feature in another, later Great Ship story. Also good is Matthew Johnson’s “The Last Islander,” a poignant story about people from a tropical island that was swallowed by rising sea-levels putting their memories together to create a virtual reconstruction of their lost home.

At one point, in the 40s and ‘50s, there were quite a few movies with essentially the same plot as Dale Bailey’s “Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous”—love triangle develops between a bickering, disenchanted married couple and the Great White Hunter who takes them on an African safari, with the husband often proving himself to be a coward and the wife falling for the macho GWH instead (sometimes the husband ends up getting eaten by a lion, sometimes just slinks away in disgrace and/or becomes a drunk). This is more or less the plot of the Bailey too, except that he adds the twist of the disenchanted couple being tourists who time-travel to a well-described Cretaceous, which strengthens the story with some nifty and suspenseful Dino Action. In “Unearthed,” William Preston tells a long, well-crafted story about miners in South America running afoul of subterranean creatures with peculiar (and somewhat unlikely) abilities; you’re supposed to recognize the unnamed hero who arrives to save the day, a huge bronze-skinned man with plenty of unusual physical and mental abilities of his own, but if you don’t (and he’s a pulp hero from long enough ago that many young readers may not), then it may diminish the impact of the story for you, or at least take away a bit of the enjoyment you might otherwise have derived from it. Chris Willrich tells the tale of a Mysterious Stranger who gives encouragement to the downtrodden survivors of a Lost Colony by serving them some “Star Soup.”

The October/November Asimov’s is considerably stronger than the September issue. The best story here, and one of the best stories of the year to date, is Jay Lake’s “The Stars Do Not Lie.” It won’t take any experienced genre reader long to realize that this is another story about a Lost Colony that has forgotten (and, in fact, vehemently denies) their origins, an elegant and somewhat steampunkish take on the subject that is evocatively written and peopled with characters of real psychological complexity, all embroiled on one side or another in a political and religious war between those who want to reveal the truth and those who want to surprises it. Also excellent is Paul McAuley’s “Antarctica Starts Here,” about the “normalization” of an increasingly ice-free Antarctica and attempts to commercially exploit it and turn it into a prime tourist destination, and one (probably doomed) rebel who fights to resist the process. Alan Smale’s “The Mongolian Book of the Dead” is also substantial, although Smale’s look at what happens when China invades and conquers Mongolia is a shrewd and exciting enough near-future political thriller that I was actually sorry to see a fantasy element come along, although it’s pretty well-handled too; I find it hard to believe, though, that the ancient Mongol hordes would stand any kind of real chance against modern troops armed with automatic weapons, especially on the open steppe where there’s no cover and sightlines are practically infinite.

The rest of the stories in October/November don’t come up to the same level of quality, although there’s some good work. Vylar Kaftan’s “Lion Dance” is a near-future, near-mainstream story about how the human spirit is hard to repress even in the most depressing and perilous of times. Ekaterina Sedia’s “A Handsome Fellow” is about a woman trapped in the Seige of Stalingrad during World War II who forms a relationship with a sinister Mysterious Stranger; some very nice historical detail here, although the woman must be particularly dense not to realize early on what the stranger actually is. Eugene Mirabelli’s “This Hologram World” is basically a straight mainstream story with no fantastic element at all, although it does feature a lot of speculation about the nature of reality in the course of telling an engrossing human story about the life of a scientist. Steven Utley’s “Shattering” is a somewhat routine people-going-crazy-in-a-spaceship story. Will Ludwigsen’s “The Ghost Factory” is a well-crafted horror story that seems somewhat out of place in Asimov’s. And Kit Reed’s “Results Guaranteed” is a satirical look at a school for very “special” children.

Interzone 241 is a strong issue after a couple of weak ones. Best story here is probably Aliette de Bodard’s “Ship’s Brother,” another of her Xuya stories, several of which have appeared this year in one venue or another, all set in an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires, and women give birth to children who are prenatally altered in the womb to become the control systems of living spaceships. This one deals with the ultimate sibling rivalry, as a brother traumatized by witnessing the birth of his “sister,” who then becomes the starship The Fisherman’s Song, develops a lifetime enmity for her and eventually an adversarial relationship with her and her kind that has dramatic consequences for the rest of the family (a grave error on the mother’s part to carelessly let her son witness such a traumatic event in the first place, of course—but people, even those with the best of intentions, sometimes do make such mistakes even in real life, often with long-term consequences). Sean McMullen’s “Steamgothic” is an extremely entertaining mainstream story about an investigation of a forgotten past technology, the kind of thing that really would make an interesting BBC documentary, right up until nearly the last page, when a sudden steampunk element swoops in to flamboyantly transform the entire world. Gareth L. Powell’s “Railroad Angel” examines the (perhaps somewhat unlikely) afterlife destiny of Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road—how strongly you react to this depends on how you feel about Cassady in the first place, I suppose. In “One Day in Time City,” David Ira Cleary shows us a romance between young bicycle messengers in a surreal city where you age or grow young as you move uptown or downtown; it’s entertaining, but since no rationale is ever offered for how this all came to pass, it’s certainly not science fiction.