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Asimov’s, February.

Lightspeed, January.

Lightspeed, February.

Eclipse, February.

F&SF, March/April

 

The February Asimov’s is a solidly entertaining issue, although there’s probably nothing here that’s going to end up on next year’s awards ballots. In “And Then Some,” Matthew Hughes spins an fast-paced tale set in his “Ten Thousand Worlds” future—a busy interstellar milieu chockablock with con artists and thieves, admittedly inspired by the work of Jack Vance—following an operative who, in spite of beatings, druggings, and false imprisonment in a hard-labor camp, grimly pursues an investigation into a notorious fraudster’s claim to be able to create a device that will reach into other universes—a claim that, for once, dismayingly, may turn out to be true. The future where global warming has caused the sea-levels to rise and swamp the coastlines has become the go-to default setting for most SF writers, but in “Outbound From Put-In-Bay,” new writer M. Bennardo takes us instead to a future where a new Ice Age is slowly making the northern tier of the United States uninhabitable, for a suspenseful and well-crafted story about a woman forced to become a reluctant smuggler, with dire effects. Vylar Kaftan then shuttles us sideways in “The Weight of the Sunrise” to an alternate world where the Incan Empire survived the onslaught of Pizzaro and the Conquistadors, for a chewy story about a humble farmer who becomes embroiled in the deadly machinations of the highest levels of court society, and comes to hold the secret for preventing that deadliest of scourges, smallpox—a secret that ruthless people will do anything to possess.

In “The Golden Age of Story,” Robert Reed shows us that it is possible to have a world with too much imagination in it. New writer David Erik Nelson gives us a rather silly use for time-travel, recruiting low-paid hand-labor, in “The New Guys Always Work Overtime.” And new writer John Chu also tells a time-travel story of sorts, episodes induced by a friendly alien for the reluctant protagonist’s own good, in a somewhat murky story called “Best of All Possible Worlds.”

Much the same could be said about the January and February issues of Lightspeed: solid entertaining work, but nothing really exceptional. The best story in the January issue, the weaker of the two issues, is Matthew Kressel’s “The Sounds of Old Earth,” an autumnal piece about the fading of one generation as a new generation rises, except that Earth itself is being lost with this old generation, as the population of the planet is being moved to a New Earth, while the ecologically ruined old planet is scheduled to be sliced up for parts; the story deals with an old man reluctant to leave his home. I have some trouble with the idea that the entire population of the world could be moved elsewhere—although with the supertechnology this society possesses, being able to slice planets up like apples, who knows?—but the story is nicely felt and nicely characterized, and the frog pond that the old man has nurtured for decades and is reluctant to abandon to its fate is nicely symbolic of all the things about the Old Earth that are being callously lost in the process. Jonathan Olfert’s “Lifeline” is a near-mainstream story about the danger a Have faces when mingling with Have-Nots that could just as well be taking place in a bad neighborhood in present-day Dakar (or in any of a thousand other places around the world), only made SF by the background detail of the destiny-predicting Lifeline system which sends the rich guy questing into the slums in the first place, which is sketchily explained and not well-integrated with the rest of the story. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s fantasy “Purity Test,” is, as is usual with Rusch, competent and entertaining, although the stereotypical unicorn that shows up at the end is a bit disappointing. A.C. Wise’s “With Tales in Their Teeth, from the Mountain They Came” is a (sort of) retake of Fahrenheit 451, well-crafted with a psychologically complex protagonist, but the method of preserving books threatened with destruction by war, tattooing them on their bodies, is silly and probably leaves them even more vulnerable, something that works better symbolically than it would in reality. There are also reprint stories by Judith Berman, Daniel Abraham, Theodora Goss, Cherie Priest, and Jeffrey Ford.

The February Lightspeed features another strong story by M. Bennardo, “The Herons of Mer de l’Quest,” told as a series of journal entries by a frontiersman lost in the wilderness of unexplored North America in the Eighteenth Century who encounters and ultimately battles a race of strange and sinister heron-like beings; good fun. Also good fun is Carrie Vaughn’s Steampunk story “Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris,” an Origin Story (to use comic book terminology) of the odd team of Harry and Marlowe (one a swashbuckling aviator, one the Princess of Wales), whose subsequent adventures have been featured in Lightspeed before, and who are shown meeting here for the first time as they scramble to escape an invasion of Paris by killer robots reverse-engineered from alien technology found in a crashed spaceship. C.C. Finlay tells a fast-paced tale of an agent on the run whose consciousness leaps uncontrollably from body to body, in “The Infill Trait.” And Genevieve Valentine tells a tricky slipstreamish version (or versions) of The Little Mermaid in “Abyssus Abyssum Invocat.” There are also reprint stories by Robert Reed, Mary Soon Lee, John Crowley, and Marly Youmans.

The February issue of Eclipse features two good stories. The best is probably “On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V—,” by Peter M. Ball, a chilly updating of the theme of being abducted to Fairyland, set in a modern-day world where regular visitations by the Fairies are not only an accepted part of life, but even used as a tourist attraction; Ball’s Fairies are especially cold and ruthless, not at all nice creatures, and the story ends well for nobody, especially its bitter and hapless protagonist, who sees everything playing out in advance, but can do nothing to stop it or alter his own fate. The other February story, “Sanctuary,” an all-too-rare appearance by Susan Palwick, takes us to a future where some kind of Rapture has taken place, leaving those not chosen struggling to survive in the ruins of society—similar to the scenario of the Left Behind books, except that Palwick’s Post-Rapture world is more surreal, where mewling, speechless Fallen Angels flutter around, crashing into things, the survivors have developed strange abilities, and reality is fluid and mutable if not continuously watched, with nails turning into caterpillars, radishes into rocks, apples into marbles, and objects tossed in the air as likely to fall up as down. It’s a gripping story, but the only problem with it is that it doesn’t explain what in the world has happened or why, or answer the question, raised in the text, of what criteria was used by Whomever to decide who got Raptured and who didn’t, since conventional notions of good or evil don’t seem to have had anything to do with it; maybe this is the start of a series or part of a larger work, and All will be explained there.

The strongest story in the March/April F&SF is probably Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Assassin.” This is Cowdrey in his grim mode, as opposed to his more common comic mode, and few writers can be grimmer than Cowdrey is when he sets himself to be so—the story tells the (yes, grim) life journey of a naïve, idealistic, would-be assassin, who, after an attempt on a despotic leader, is captured and thrown into a slave-labor camp even more harrowing than the one in Matthew Hughes’s “And Then Some,” and whom, after suffering years of Dickensian hardship, is brought round by an ironic twist of fate to take another shot at the same target. It’s all quite compelling, and the only minor quibble I have with it is that a random selection of inhabitants of Hilo, relocated to another island after a tsunami destroys their city, is not going to produce Cowdrey’s idyllic group of South Sea Islanders, well-adapted to a primitive lifestyle, but rather a bewildered assortment of modern-day Americans struggling to deal with a life without cellphones, air conditioning, and pizza. Naomi Kritzer’s “Solidarity,” a YA piece about a young girl struggling to survive in a corrupt Libertarian society after being disowned by her powerful and corrupt father, is similarly entertaining, although each story in this sequence becomes harder to fully appreciate without having read the earlier stories, and it’s become clear that this is actually a de facto novel serialization. Sean McMullen’s “The Lost Faces” is a supernatural revenge drama set in Ancient Rome—absorbing, except that the ifryt is so all-powerful that there’s little suspense about whether or not she’ll succeed (and the fact that the Roman Empire, far from being doomed, lasted for centuries after the reign of Caligula). Deborah J. Ross’s “Among Friends” is another historical piece, focusing on a Quaker farmer who is part of the Underground Railroad in an Alternate World where everything seems much the same as in our timeline, except that sophisticated, sentient automatons exist; this kept reminding me, pleasantly, of Friendly Persuasion, although the analogy between slaves seeking freedom and automatons seeking to become self-determining is a little too one-to-one, and I could have done without the portentous Historical Cameo at the end.

“The Boy Who Drank from Lovely Women,” probably one of the last stories we’ll see, alas, from the late Steven Utley, is also, in part, a historical piece, following the life of a rakish, handsome young cad from a campaign to put down a slave rebellion in Eighteenth Century Haiti through his slowly dawning realization that somewhere along the line he’s become immortal—and then to the present day, where he struggles with the moral implications of his staying eternally young; one of the things I like about the story is that the protagonist is conflicted about whether his immortality is a blessing or a curse, and that he really can’t figure out how it happened in the first place, although several theories are advanced. “What the Red Oaks Knew,” written by Elizabeth Bourne in collaboration with her husband, the late Mark Bourne, is a backwoods lowlife fantasy, complete with sinister spell-casting Augur Men, rundown trailers, and pot-growers, but shot through with moments of surprising lyricism; the overall effect is something like an Andy Duncan story, high praise. Chet Arthur’s “The Trouble with Heaven” is a slyly comic story about labor troubles on a space station inhabited by millionaires who expect great service for their money, and the resourceful semi-retired diplomat (put out to pasture in a “safe posting”) who has to deal with them, all reminding me a bit of a less openly farcical version of one of Keith Laumer’s Retief stories. The rest of the stories in the issue are less successful.