Eclipse Online, October
Eclipse Online, November
Eclipse Online, December
Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-361-7, $15.95, 332 pages.) Cover art by Chris Martin.
The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where On Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin. (Small Beer Press, 978-1-618-73034, $24.00, 246 pages).
The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin. (Small Beer Press, 978-1-618-73035-0, $24.00, 286 pages.)
The Best of Joe Haldeman, edited by Jonathan Strahan. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-526-0, $45.00, 504 pages.)
Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories: Expanded Edition, Allen Steele. (Fantastic Books, 978-1-61720-358-9, $19.99. 514 pages.) Cover art by Ron Miller.
At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson. (Small Beer Press, 978-1-93152-080-5, $16.00, 304 pages.)
Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse series, which started with Eclipse One in 2007 and ran through Eclipse Four in 2011, was one of the most important annual (more or less) original SF anthology series of our day. Late in the year, in one of the more interesting developments of 2012, Strahan announced that Eclipse was transforming itself from a print anthology to an online magazine, Eclipse Online, accessible at www.nightshadebooks.com, which would release two stories every month throughout the year. Three issues of Eclipse Online appeared in 2012, the October, November, and December issues, and so far the literary quality here has been very high, with several of the stories having already been picked up by one or another of the Year’s Best anthology series. My favorite Eclipse story to date, from the December issue, is Lavie Tidhar’s “The Memcordist,” another of his “Central Station” stories, set in a busy interplanetary and multicultural future swarming with robots, cyborgs, rogue A.I.s, and bizarrely bioengineered creatures of every description, all of whom mix and mingle and interact in the gritty back streets of Old Tel Aviv, along with earlier waves of immigrants and refugees. This one, which also takes us to the colonies of the Outer Solar System and back, features a protagonist whose entire life, from birth to death, is being broadcast, with millions of viewers watching every moment of his existence. Also good in December is Christopher Barzak’s “Invisible Men,” which takes an ultimately rather touching look at the events of one of H.G. Wells most famous novels from an entirely different perspective.
The best story in the November issue is Eleanor Arnason’s “Holmes Sherlock: A Hwarhath Mystery,” another story in her long-running series about the alien Hwarhath people, which also includes her critically acclaimed novel A Woman of the Iron People. This one deals in a subtly droll manner with an alien woman who becomes obsessed with a human fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, and in the course of describing the effect that that obsession has on her relationships with her own people, has something to say about human nature as well; ultimately, her fascination with the great detective and the insights provided by employing his methods allows her to solve a baffling mystery on her own world. November also features a nicely done YA story about pyromania, Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s, “Firebugs.”
The best story in the October issue, and one of the best fantasy stories published all year, is K.J. Parker’s “One Little Room An Everywhere,” a slyly funny story about a young wizard trying to take a magical shortcut to success that leads him down some very strange byways indeed, and who learns that the price of success may be more than he’s willing to pay. Also good in October is Christopher Rowe’s “The Contrary Gardener,” about a disgruntled gardener in a radically Green future dominated by biotechnology who runs afoul of a conspiracy to destroy the “thinking machines” that the conspirators fear are getting a little too smart.
With 2013 looming as I write these words, let’s take a quick look at some of the worthwhile short-story collections of 2012 that haven’t gotten mentioned yet here this year.
Elizabeth Bear is one of the most accomplished of all the field’s new (or new-er, anyway, since she’s been publishing since about 2003) writers. Her latest collection, Shoggoths in Bloom, is her best yet, containing her Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winning story “Tideline,” her clever homage to Asimov’s robot stories, “Dolly,” “Gods of the Forge,” “The Something-Dreaming Game,” and her intricate novella of a future India, “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns,” as well as an original story, the somber and moving “The Death of Terrestrial Radio.” This is a mixed SF/fantasy collection, and, for me, the SF generally works better than the fantasy, but also collected here is her Hugo-winning “Shoggoths in Bloom,” which is great fun for any fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, as well as other good fantasy stories such as “Orm the Beautiful,” “Love Among the Talus,” and “The Horrid Glory of Its Wings.”
One of the greatest of all the field’s Old Masters, Ursula K. Le Guin, had two monumental collections out this year, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where On Earth and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands. My tastes being what they are, I thought that the second volume, Outer Space, Inner Lands, which contains most of the SF stories, many of them from her “Hainish” cycle, was the stronger of the two volumes, containing powerful stuff such as “Nine Lives,” “Betrayals,” “The Matter of Seggri,” “The Shobies’ Story,” “Semley’s Necklace,” and the award-winning “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (although at least two of the stories in this volume are fantasies, “The Wild Girls” and “The Rule of Names,” the earliest story here and one of the seeds of her later Earthsea series)...but the first volume, Where On Earth, which mostly concentrates on stories that are closer to slipstream or even straight mainstream, has some great stuff as well, including “Ether, OR,” “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” “The Direction of the Road,” “May’s Lion,” and several of her wonderfully written “Orsinian Tales,” including “Brothers and Sisters,” “A Week in the Country,” and “Unlocking the Air,” which may be among the earliest examples of the now-frequent subgenre that tells realistic stories with no supernatural elements set in totally imaginary countries (this volume also contains a straight SF story, and a good one, “The Diary of the Rose”).
Another (relatively) Old Master, from the generation just after Le Guin, is Joe Haldeman, who also had a big retrospective collection out this year, The Best of Joe Haldeman. The best story here may be the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella “The Hemingway Hoax,” but there’s plenty of other first-class work here, including “Hero,” the seed that grew into his most famous novel, The Forever War, “For White Hill,” “None So Blind,” “The Mars Girl,” “Sleeping Dogs,” “Anniversary Project,” “Tricentennial,” and “More Than the Sum of His Parts,” as well as stuff a bit removed from his usual science fiction, such as “Manifest Destiny,” a Western, and “Lindsay and the Red City Blues,” a supernatural horror story.
Another exceptional writer from the generation just a few years after Haldeman (literary generations are often separated by only a few years of real-world time in the science fiction genre) is John Kessel. His 2012 retrospective, The Collected Kessel, is available as an ebook from Baen Books (www.baen.com). Kessel is an eclectic writer with a wide range that covers all sorts of SF, plus fantasy and slipstream and near-mainstream. Unsurprisingly, I like his SF work the best, and this volume collects some of his best SF stories, including the wonderful “The Pure Product,” “Some Like It Cold,” “The Miracle of Ivar Avenue,” “The Juniper Tree,” “Stories For Men,” “Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance,” and “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine,” but some of his non-SF stuff is first-rate as well, including “Pride and Prometheus” (which was doing the mash-up thing long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and doing it better), “Gulliver At Home,” and the unclassifiable, Nebula-winning “Another Orphan,” but even the near-mainstream stories such as “Every Angel Is Terrifying” and “Buffalo” are riveting.
Another literary generation down from Kessel is Allen M. Steele, who has made a career primarily out of Heinleinesque novels and stories that explore humankind’s expansion into space. Some of the best of these are collected in Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories: Expanded Edition, an enlarged version of an earlier collection. The best stories here are probably the poignant “The Emperor of Mars” and the darkly comic “The Death of Captain Future,” both stories Hugo Award-winners, but the book also features strong work such as “The Weight,” “The Exile of Evening Star,” “Zwarte Piet’s Tale,” “Live From the Mars Hotel,” “Working for Mister Chicago,” “The War Memorial,” and “The Return of Weird Frank.”
Like Elizabeth Bear, Kij Johnson belongs to a more-recent literary generation; she started selling in the late ‘80s, although she didn’t really attract any serious attention in the field until the mid ‘90s. Some of the best of her stories are gathered in her 2012 collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees. Johnson’s work is sometimes more slipstreamish than I usually like, and some of that tone slips into even her science fiction, which often inhabits the borderland between SF and fantasy, but there’s a liquid clarity to her voice and a lyrical elegance to her prose that sometimes makes me like stuff I usually wouldn’t. The best story here is the most recent, and the closest thing to a hard SF story that Johnson has yet written, the complex and compelling novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” which won her both Nebula and Hugo Awards in 2012 and in my opinion may have been the best novella of the previous year. There is other strong work here, though, most of it falling on a line somewhere between slipstream and straight genre fantasy, including “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles,” the Sturgeon Award-winner “Fox Magic,” “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change,” “Story Kit,” her controversial (and harrowing) Nebula Award-winner, “Spar,” “The Horse Raiders,” and “At the Mouth of the River of Bees.”