55

Asimov’s, March.

Superheroes, ed Rich Horton. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-380-8, $15.95, 375 pages). Cover design by Michael King.

Future Games, ed Paula Guran. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-381-5, $15.95, 371 pages). Cover design by Michael King.

Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, by Jack Vance, eds Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-560-4, $45.00, 336 pages). Cover art by Tom Kidd.

 

The March issue of Asimov’s features that magazine’s strongest story so far this year, “Feral Moon,” by Alexander Jablokov. This is a superior example of the Military SF subgenre, far more sophisticated, and inventive than the standard product, following a disgraced officer in the midst of an intra-Solar System war who must lead troops who despise and distrust him on a campaign to fight their way corridor by corridor into the interior of an embattled Phobos that has been honeycombed with tunnels and turned into a into a fortress. Things are complicated by the need to do as little damage as possible to the non-combatant members of the colony, by military politics, and by the fact that the officer’s estranged ex-wife, head of a relief mission, is trapped somewhere inside; we learn about the reasons for the officer’s disgrace in flashbacks. All of which makes for a chewy and compelling novella. Also excellent, although a very different kind of story, is “Needlework,” by Lavie Tidhar. A story set in his complex, evocative, multi-cultural “Central Station” future, when humanity is spreading through the solar system, “Needlework” is almost plotless, a slice-of-life story that follows two Vietnamese kids from the same village who pursue different paths through life with the ultimate goal of getting into space (or the “Up-And-Out,” as it’s called here, in a clear shout-out to Cordwainer Smith); they only met again in the last few paragraphs, and while this might function better as the first section of a much longer story, the writing here is so lyrical and the characters so interesting that it does reach a sort of closure anyway, with the rest of their conjoined story implicit in the text.

Not quite on the same level, but also good, and solidly entertaining, is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Uncertainty,” which shares certain points of similarity with Rick Wilber’s “Something Real” from last year, both being about baseball-player turned spy Moe Berg (a real historical figure), a mission to assassinate physicist Werner Heisenberg before he can reveal information that would enable the Nazis to create an atomic bomb before we do, and lots of time-hopping across a bewildering array of alternate timelines. Apparently editor Sheila Williams received these two similar stories almost at the same time, and decided to buy both of them, something that does happen; when I was the editor at Asimov’s, I once received two stories within a day of each other about an alternate world where Fidel Castro played professional baseball in the United States instead of becoming the ruler of Cuba, and bought and ran both of them. In spite of similarities, Rusch’s story reads quite differently from Wilber’s, and brings us to a different place in conclusion.

Everything else in the issue is weaker. Michael Cassutt tells a sly postmodern joke in “Pitching Old Mars.” Jason Sanford mingles Buddhism and nanotechnology in “Monday’s Monk”; unfortunately, the use to which the nanotech is used is so far beyond what any real nanotech is likely to be able to ever do that it borders on the silly, and becomes merely a Magic Plot Wand to wave to resolve the story. And new writer Garrett Ashley gives us a rather nasty fable about a man who is reincarnated as a pig (reincarnation seems to be something of a subtheme in this issue, also featuring in Sanford’s story) and ends up being “reunited” with his starving family.

Stories about superheroes—handled either straightforwardly or satirically, or that cross the superhero meme with other kinds of story in an interstitial, postmodern fashion—have been slipping into science fiction markets for several years now. Although the powers the superheroes possess are unlikely enough scientifically—if not flatout impossible, by the laws of physics as we understand them—to make it difficult to really justify them as SF, nobody seems to mind them appearing in SF anthologies and magazines (although, interestingly, there are still occasionally complaints about fantasy stories appearing in such places), perhaps because the influence of George R.R. Martin’s long-running Wild Cards anthology series has made them an acceptable part of the mix, or perhaps because superhero movies, often accepted as “sci-fi movies,” have become such a big part of our society. (Many of these postmodern superhero stories deal with the family life and problems of the superheroes, which might indicate a big influence from the animated movie The Incredibles—although Spider-Man has been dealing with such issues in the comics since the early ‘60s.) Whatever the reason, they’ve been turning up with increasing frequency of late, and now we have an anthology collecting such stories, Superheroes, edited by Rich Horton. The best story here, by a good margin, is Daryl Gregory’s “The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm,” a strange mixture of comic book superhero stuff and harrowing political suffering and endurance set in a rather Eastern European-like country, something like what you might get if you took Doctor Doom’s home country of Latveria seriously as a real country in the real world and got Solzhenitsyn to write the script; the images here are riveting, and the mixture of the two discordant elements is striking and sometimes surprising. Also good here are Kelly Link’s “Secret Identity,” Ian McDonald’s “Tonight We Fly,” Peter S. Beagle’s “Dirae,” Aaron Schutz’s “Dr. Death vs. The Vampire,” and James Patrick Kelly’s “The Biggest,” and there are also stories in the book by Margaret Ronald, Leah Bobet, Matthew Johnson, Jei D. Marcade, Ian Donald Keeling, Kat Beyer, Joseph Mallozzi, Carol Emshwiller, Elena Fortin, and Gord Sellar.

I did my own version of this anthology back in 2007, Dangerous Games, co-edited with Jack Dann, but the idea has come around again, probably because of the huge popularity of The Hunger Games, and now we have Future Games, edited by Paula Guran. The best story here is probably Howard Waldrop’s quirky “Man-Mountain Gentian,” but there’s also good stories such as “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis!,” by Kate Wilhelm and “The Survivor,” by Walter F. Moudy (perhaps the first dangerous game story, from back in 1965, although an argument could also be made for Gladiator-At-Law, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth), both of them published long before either The Hunger Games or TV show Survivor appeared, “Run to Starlight,” by George R.R. Martin, “Diamond Girls,” by Louise Marley, “Breakaway,” by George Alec Effinger, and “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” by Scott Westerfeld, as well as stories by John Shirley, James Morrow, Genevieve Williams, Joel Richards, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, and Timons Esaias. Interestingly, the anthology includes both Orson Scott Card’s famous “Ender’s Game” and the story that satirizes it (or at least uses it for inspiration to spin off in its own direction) “Anda’s Game,” by Cory Doctorow.

Apparently I missed the first two volumes of these, but 2013 brings around Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, by Jack Vance, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan. As the title promises, these are some of the early stories that Jack Vance wrote in his apprentice days of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, and which were published in pulp magazines such as Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, Saturn Science Fiction, and Super Science Stories, pretty much the bottom of the SF magazine market of the day, of which Astounding was the top, even a cut below Planet Stories in prestige. Unsurprisingly, these early stories are nowhere near the level of quality reached by Vance’s mature work, and some of them are pretty ordinary period fare—“Planet of the Black Dust” may be the weakest of them—but if you can disconnect your 21st Century critical faculties, they’re all pretty entertaining, straightforward pulp adventure, and here and there a hint of the ingenuity, imagination, and verbal playfulness that characterized Vance’s later work shines through.  “The House Lords” may come the closest to being the kind of sly and subtle thing that Vance would later deliver in stories like “The Moon Moth,” although “The Ten Books” has its points of interest as well.

The last seven stories of the collection introduce one of Vance’s series characters, the freelance “effectuator” Magnus Ridolph, clearly Vance’s Sherlock Holmes analogue, although Ridolph is as much a con-artist as he is an investigator, and takes on most of his cases not because of any desire to bring about justice or even out of intellectual curiosity or boredom, like Holmes, but because the failure of one of his get-rich-quick schemes has left him short of funds—in fact, he often matches wits with other con men who are trying to defraud him and/or his clients, and the enjoyment comes from seeing how he proves himself smarter than those who think they’re smarter than he is. The best of the Ridolph stories, like “The Kokod Warriors,” would appear later, but those here are slyly amusing, although, it must be said, some of them demonstrate the differences in social attitudes between the pulp era and today. In “The Howling Bounders,” for instance, Ridolph, who has taken over a farm on an alien planet as a business investment, solves the problem of having his valuable crop of resilian-bearing plants raided and destroyed by the semi-intelligent local natives by devising a cunning trap that captures them, and then coolly kills them, and boils them down to extract and sell the resilian from which they themselves are also made, thus recouping his losses. This is unlikely to go over as well with today’s audiences as it did in 1949.