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F&SF, January/February.

Asimov’s, January.

Eclipse, January.

Clarkesworld, January.

 

The best story in the January/February F&SF is probably Alex Irvine’s clever “Watching the Cow,” about an experimental technique used in a video game that inadvertently causes all the kids of a certain age who happen to be playing the game to go blind...and, it turns out, rewires their brains in weirder ways as well. The story deals with the efforts of the father of some of the afflicted children to find some kind of cure, and is a pretty satisfactory read. The only quibble I have with it is that it seems like it takes the FBI an awfully long time to get around to investigating the father, who is the brother of the woman who accidently blinded millions of children and subsequently goes on the run as a fugitive; you’d think her immediate family would be the first people they’d look into in an effort to find her. In “Ten Lights and Darks,” Judith Moffett also manages to make a satisfying human story out of the rather unpromising subject matter of pet whisperers, psychics who make telepathic/emphatic contact with dogs. Robert Reed tells a subtle, complicated tale of alien observers who lurk mostly unnoticed in human society, in “Among Us.” Ken Liu gives us a moving story of the uncounted price of great human endeavors in “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” an engineering project on a sufficiently goshwowish scale...although it seems a bit incautious to build a underground tunnel across the most techtonically active region on Earth, and my guess is that it wouldn’t function for long without disaster.

The rest of the stuff in the issue is somewhat less successful, although there are few outright failures. F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey contributes another comic adventure of his pair of mismatched ghostbusters, Jimmy and Morrie, as they tackle “A Haunting in Love City.” David Gerrold takes us aboard the “Night Train to Paris” with him for an atmospheric and well-told, if rather predictable, horror story. Matthew Hughes tries a bit too hard in “Devil or Angel,” about the conflict for the human soul that goes on between the good angels who sit on one shoulder and the devils who sit on the other, both whispering advice (yes, just like in all those cartoons), but the humor is labored and it goes on much too long. Dale Bailey tells a glum afterlife story in “This Is How You Disappear,” and new writer Desmond Warzel spins a tale about a haunted car that also goes on much too long, in “The Blue Celeb.”

After a strong year in 2012, Asimov’s starts 2013 with a rather weak January issue. The two best stories here are probably James Van Pelt’s “The Family Rocket” and Nancy Kress’s “Mithridates, He Died Old.” The Van Pelt is an exercise in Bradburian nostalgia for the glory days of the Space Program (set, rather oddly, in a future where interplanetary travel is common, although it is said to be affordable only by the rich), featuring a possibly delusional father who’s building a spaceship out of scrap in the junkyard out back (much the same idea is used in Lavie Tidhar’s “The Integrity of the Chain,” from 2009, although with considerably less Bradbury mixed in) Whether or not the cobbled-together spaceship actually works is left deliberately ambiguous—although the odds are that it does not. Kress’s story is a sensitively characterized study of a woman in a coma reviewing her life’s mistakes while undergoing an experimental treatment to bring wake her up—one with a bitterly ironic twist at the end; not Kress at the top of her form, but still worthwhile.

New writer Suzanne Palmer’s “Hotel” is an entertaining knockabout thriller/farce about a rundown, seedy hotel in a remote area where the down-on-their-luck residents, most with secret pasts they want to conceal, turn out to be secret agents or criminals who chase through the corridors shooting at each other or hitting each other over the head in scrambling competition to get the MacGuffin they’re all after. Amiable and amusing, although it’s hard to see what’s really gained by having the hotel be a hotel on Mars, as the plot would not be essentially affected if it was a rundown rural hotel in Utah or Oregon instead. Will McIntosh’s “Over There” is a literalization of the famous Two-Slit Experiment, one which splits the consciousness of its observers into two separate but parallel universes, with the observers experiencing life in both realities at the same time—cataclysmic effects caused by the experiment itself soon cause the realities to begin to diverge, although the observers continue to experience both at the same time, with some interesting and ultimately dire results. New writer Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “They Shall Salt the Earth With Seeds of Glass” takes us to a future Earth that is being ruled by draconian conquerors called “glassmen”—presumptively aliens, although that’s never made entirely clear—whose main preoccupation seems to be forbidding human women from having abortions; it’s a glum story, and the obsessive focus of the glassmen in forbidding abortion and making it punishable by death comes to seem like a rather heavyhanded political allegory. Kit Reed tells a droll story about feral girl scouts in “The Legend of Troop 13.”

F. Brett Helmut’s “The Amnesia Helmet,” one of the two stories from the January Eclipse, is another nostalgic story clearly influenced by Ray Bradbury—although there’s an understated, almost subliminal, hint of child abuse and perhaps even child molestation that you certainly wouldn’t find in anything by Bradbury. The main story line is full of fine, evocative details about being a kid whose fantasy life revolves around going to see Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials at a movie house, although the nostalgic stuff is undercut by the presence of a menacing father and the ominous hints of child abuse, not only for the protagonist but for her friends, and there’s the feeling that the story is building toward a climax that it never quite reaches. As in Van Pelt’s story from the January Asimov’s, the fantastic element here—the eponymous “Amnesia Helmet,” inspired by a gadget from the Buck Rogers serial—may or may not be real; that’s left deliberately ambiguous.

The other story in the January Eclipse, Genevieve Valentine’s “The Advocate,” is somewhat disappointing. I think she was trying for ironic postmodernism here, but the core idea, that a handful of alien microorganisms found on Mars would be named “The Martian Ambassador” and given an embassy building and a staff, although they are totally non-sentient, and that everybody else in the diplomatic community would solemnly go along with the charade, never struck me as anything other than silly. It didn’t help improve my impression of the story that Valentine makes the basic error of having radio conversations taking place between people on Earth and people on Mars without any time-delay lag whatsoever.

The best story in the January Clarkesworld is probably Ian McDonald’s moody, enigmatic fantasy, “Drifting,” in which a beachcomber collects plastic toys and other plastic refuse washed into the Pacific by the Japanese tsunami and uses them to create strange works of art, collages of found items glued together. He meets a mysterious girl at the seaside, and soon odd, ominous things are happening, including rains of sea water, impenetrable fogs, sugar that turns to salt, and an evil stench that smells like rotting seaweed and dead crabs, all eventually prompting the artist to give his most recent found objects back to the sea. This is a heavily symbolic story, but I think it’s more or less clear what’s going on here for the most part, although McDonald never spells it out—but I must admit that the last paragraph, in which the artist returns to his room and finds it filled with long, rippling, dripping hair, confuses me, and I’m not really sure what its import is.

Yoon Ha Lee’s “Effigy Nights,” also in the January Clarkesworld, at first seems to be one of her Space Opera stories, but it’s really a fantasy disguised as Space Opera, or at best a science-fantasy story, featuring spaceships and civilizations on other worlds, but also mages who conjure up paper folkhero guardians from out of scrolls of ancient poems and sagas to protect the people of the city from ruthless invaders. This turns out to be maybe not such a good idea.

The last story in the January Clarkesworld is Helena Bell’s “Variations on Bluebeard and Dalton’s Law Along the Event Horizon,” an opaque retelling of the Bluebeard story.

So, no real science fiction at all in the year’s initial issue of Clarkesworld. I hope this isn’t going to be a trend.