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F&SF, November/December.

Asimov’s, December.

Edge of Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 353 pages.)

Going Interstellar, eds. Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt. (Baen, 978-1-4516-3778-6, $7.99, 434 pages.) Cover art by Sam Kennedy.

Arc 1.3.

 

The best story in the November/December F&SF, and in fact easily the best science fiction story that F&SF has published all year, is Robert Reed’s novella “Katabasis,” another of his “Great Ship” stories, a long-running series about a Jupiter-sized spaceship that endlessly travels the Galaxy with millions of passengers from many different races, including humans. In this one, bored rich immortals compete to complete a months-long trek across difficult terrain for no particular reason except to gain prestige in the eyes of their peers and perhaps to face a deadly challenge as a change from their over-protected lives; many of them don’t make it, in fact—but death is not quite as permanent a condition in this society as it is in our own. The novella follows the progress of one such party, shepherded on the way by an alien guide, the eponymous Katabasis, whose own story about how she came to be traveling on the Great Ship is told in flashbacks. Reed may be the best in science fiction at taking you step by painful step through a grueling, extended physical process, really making you feel the reserves you have to call upon in order to make it, and here we get two such processes, the almost-unsurvivable trek of the tourist party that Katabasis is guiding, and her own earlier and even more harrowing race across an alien dessert, family and friends falling at her side almost with every step. I sometimes wonder if it’s Reed’s own personal history as a long-distance runner that makes him so good at describing these kinds of limits-testing physical ordeals? At any rate, I felt like putting my feet up after reading this one, and you may too. Also good here is Naomi Kritzer’s “High Stakes,” a direct sequel to her “Liberty’s Daughter” in the May/June issue, part of a YA series which reads sort of like Nancy Drew written by the Heinlein of Podkayne of Mars, set in a floating Libertarian Utopia that becomes more unpleasant the more closely the way it really functions is examined. It’s even more obvious here than it was with the first story that this is a de facto novelization, with major plotlines left unresolved, something that will probably be exacerbated in further chunks as conveying the backstory becomes more of a chore. Entertaining reading, though, with a nice voice.

Nothing else in the issue is as successful. Steven Popkes’s “Breathe” is about a family with the power to steal breath from other people, and the morality of using that gift, and to what degree. Albert E. Cowdrey sends his pair of ghostbusters, Jimmie and Morrey to Mississippi, to an Antebellum mansion where they have to deal with “The Ladies in Waiting.” Chris Willrich gives us a man fighting Alernate Universe versions of himself, in “Waiting for a Me Like You.” New writer Alter S. Reiss’s “If the Stars Reverse Their Courses, If the Rivers Run Back from the Sea” features a man going back to the past to win a current-day battle, although, unusually, the time-travel method is fantasy rather than SF. And Alan Dean Foster spins another Tall Tale about series character Mad Amos Malone, in “Claim Blame.”

The best story in a strong December Asimov’s, capping a strong year overall, is Steven Popkes’s novella “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected.” I often don’t like rock ‘n roll stories, which frequently demonstrate little knowledge either of music or the music business, but Popkes does a good job of convincing me that he knows both well, and his performance scenes, which often ring false in this kind of stories, are similarly convincing. The story is also peopled with psychologically complex and real-feeling characters whose fate you come to care about, and is very well-executed.

Also good in December are Ken Liu’s “The Waves,” Robert Reed’s “The Pipes of Pan,” and Chris Beckett’s “The Caramel Forest.” The Liu story begins aboard a generation ship which is in the midst of a long journey to the stars when a message is beamed from Earth telling the people aboard the secret of achieving immortality; like Liu’s “Arc” in the September/October F&SF, this part of the story then becomes a debate about when/whether you should die to make room for new generations if the choice not to die is yours, although here Liu seems to come down on the opposite side of the argument than he did in “Arc.” Just when it seems the story is about to end, though, there’s a scene change, as it turns out that colonists from Earth have arrived at the target planet long before the inhabitants of the generation ship, using Faster-Than-Light travel invented subsequent to their departure, and they offer the crew another choice—whether to stay organically human or to change into a mechanical posthuman form. And there’s another decision yet to come, after a subsequent journey to another star-system, as relentless change continues to crash over the ship’s crew like the waves of the title. Reed’s story is a quiet study of a scientist coming to learn, over the course of a long and turbulent career, the choice every living being must sooner or later make. Beckett’s story, a sequel to his “Day 29” from last year’s July issue, examines colonists, or, in this case, their children, trying to adapt to life on a strange alien planet where, as becomes increasingly obvious with each story in this sequence, they don’t belong and probably shouldn’t be at all.

Mike Resnick’s “The Wizard of West 34th Street” is not in the same league as the above stories, but then, it doesn’t intend to be, and works fine as what it is: a funny story that adapts a classic fantasy trope to a modern urban setting. As a humorous piece, it’s more successful and less heavy-handed than the issue’s other attempt at humor, Sandra McDonald’s “The Black Feminist’s Guide to +Science Fiction Film Editing.”

Easily the best original science fiction anthology of the year, by a good margin, is Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan—true, original SF anthologies have been light on the ground this year, but Edge of Infinity would be a standout in any year. Unusually, in these days when it seems almost de rigueur for editors to sneak some slipstream or fantasy stories into even ostensibly “All SF” anthologies, everything here actually is pure-quill core SF, some of it hard SF at that, and the literary quality is uniformly excellent across the board. There’s nothing that’s bad here, again unlike most anthologies, which makes it difficult to pick favorites, but among the strongest stories are Pat Cadigan’s “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” about a worker injured in an accident in orbit around Jupiter dealing with the problems and benefits of changing your species, Paul McAuley’s linked quintet of five small stories “Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden,” which provides a picturesque tour of the outer solar system in the aftermath of the Quiet War, Gwyneth Jones’s “Bricks, Sticks, Straw,” in which software agents struggle to reassemble their identities after suffering a solar storm on Callisto, Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Tyche and the Ants,” which tells a tale of political warfare and cyberattack through the focus of a child’s whimsical fantasy world, and Bruce Sterling’s “The Peak of Eternal Light,” a comedy of manners about intricate sexual mores on Mercury that reveals one of Sterling’s influences to be P.G. Wodehouse, something that might come as a surprise to someone who never read earlier stories like his “The Beautiful and the Sublime.” In addition, Edge of Infinity contains excellent work by Elizabeth Bear, James S.A. Corey, Sandra McDonald and Stephen D. Covey, John Barnes, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, and An Owomoyela, any of which would have been among the standout stories in any other SF anthology of the year. If you like core SF, this is the anthology to buy this year.

Going Interstellar, edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt, is another of the year’s rare original SF anthologies—it’s nowhere near as good overall as Edge of Infinity, but it does contain an excellent novella by Michael Bishop, “Twenty Lights “to The Land of Snow””, in which Tibetan dissidents and refuges flee to the stars in a generation ship in company with the Dali Lama, the first core SF story Bishop has told in some years, and a welcome return to the days when he was turning out SF novellas such as “Death and Designation Among the Asadi” and “The House of Compassionate Sharers.” Going Interstellar also contains solid work by Jack McDevitt, Ben Bova, and others, as well as non-fiction essays about possible designs for interstellar spaceships by Dr. Gregory Maloff, Dr. Richard Obousy, and Les Johnson himself.

After two strong issues, the latest edition of Arc, Arc 1.3, is somewhat disappointing. 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). Each issue contains a mix of non-fiction essays and fiction, and while the essays in this issue remain eclectic and interesting—Samuel Arbesman speculates on the kinds of relationships we might form with machines that are smarter than we are, Christina Agapakis explores biotechnology, Justin Pickard examines the implications of a future rise of Luddite movements—the fiction is overall somewhat weak. The best story here by a good margin is Lavie Tidhar’s “Chosing Faces,” a look at the plasticity of identity granted by future technology so wildly imaginative that it actually tumbles over the edge into Galaxy-style satire. The other two stories, Dave Gullen’s “All Your Futures” and Nan Craig’s “Scrapmetal,” are solid, competent efforts, but nothing exceptional, and although the editors boast about how new and exciting the core ideas explored in each story are, in fact, they’re nothing new; in fact, Ken Liu’s “Waves,” from the December Asimov’s, uses the same core idea as “All Your Futures,” colonists on a generation ship being beaten to their destination by spaceships using Faster-Than-Light drives developed after the colonists left—and Liu wasn’t the first one to explore this idea either.