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Interzone, January/February.

Interzone, March/April.

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures, Garth Nix. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-500-0, $35.00, 136 pages.) Cover art by Tom Canty.

Big Mama Stories, Eleanor Arnason. (Aqueduct Press, 978-1-61976-029-5, $16, 184 pages) Cover art by Ta-coumba Aiken.

Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, John Varley. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-528-4, $45.00, 344 pages.) Cover art by Vincent Chong.

A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, Paul McAuley. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848635-96-8, 25.00 Pounds Sterling, 435 pages.) Cover art by Jim Burns.

 

Interzone starts the year off with a strong issue, the January/February issue. Best story here is “The Book Seller,” by Lavie Tidhar, another of his interconnected “Central Station” stories, a complex, evocative, multi-cultural future, set during a time when humanity—including part-human robots, AIs, cyborgs, and genetically engineered beings of all sorts—is spreading through the solar system. This one deals with a humble, introspective book dealer in Old Tel Aviv, in the shadow of the immense Central Station, where spaceships come and go, who gives shelter to a strigoi, a kind of cybernetic vampire who feeds on data, and the odd, ever-deepening relationship that develops between them. The story doesn’t really resolve in any conventional sense, but it’s become clear that Tidhar is building a mosaic novel here, and what really counts in the Central Station stories is the many threads, some obvious, some subtle, that connect the characters and bind them into an intricate web. Tidhar may give a clue about what he’s up to with his protagonist’s musing: “Life was half-completed plots abandoned, heroes dying half-way along their quests, loves requited and un-, some fading inexplicably, some burning short and bright.” In the hands of some authors, this lack of conventional closure would be annoying and pretentious, but the world Tidhar is building here is so rich and multi-layered, and the characters so quirky and interesting, that I’m willing to give him a break on it. There’s a synergistic effect at work here, and the more of these Central Station stories you read, the more you appreciate the ones you’ve already read, and see depths and connections you hadn’t noticed the first time around.

Also good in January/February is “Sky Leap-Earth Flame,” by Jim Hawkins. The story is a bit murky at first, but as it goes along, once you sort our who is who and what’s happening, it becomes a gripping depiction of an emergency-rush project to develop a giant artificial brain, the only thing smart enough to be able to pilot a mission to divert a menace that could destroy the Galaxy—but, of course, there are unforeseen complications. New writer Helen Jackson turns in a solidly entertaining effort, taking us in “Build Guide” to a construction project in near-Earth orbit for a tale of ambition, larceny, greed, and cutthroat corporate politics. New writer Guy Haley contributes a brief autumnal glimpse of the world after humans are extinct and all that’s left of human civilization is wind-swept ruins, in the bleak but evocative “iRobot”. And Tracie Welser gives us a glum dystopia, something of an Interzone specialty, in “A Flag Still Flies Over Sabor City.”

The March/April Interzone is somewhat weaker overall. The strongest story here is probably “The International Studbook of the Giant Panda,” by new writer Carlos Hernandez, a well-crafted and entertaining piece that centers around a scheme to encourage Giant Pandas to mate by using remote-controlled robot pandas to enflame their lust by performing simulated coitus in front of them, hoping that one of the male pandas will eventually be encouraged to take a crack at the “female” robot panda themselves, thus depositing their sperm. The weakness of the story is that this is a ridiculously over-elaborate and immensely expensive way to gather sperm for artificial insemination, especially as much of the collected sperm is then just going to be sent to refuges where the pandas will be inseminated in the more usual way. The assumption that the female robot panda must be operated by a human woman is also unexamined; what difference would it make if it was a man operating the robot panda, or even if it was running on automatic pilot? Still, if you can ignore this, it’s a fun read. Also good in March/April is Paskutinis Iliuzja (The Last Illusion), by new writer Damien Walters Grintalis, a sad and emotionally powerful fantasy about a wizard trying haplessly to protect his family from Nazi genocide in World War II Lithuania. Chris Butler contributes “The Animator,” a follow up to his previous “Tell Me Everything,” an otherwise fairly standard story of suppression of art and progress by vested conservative forces, set in a somewhat unlikely world where people emit pheromones that enable them to read each other’s emotions; I had thought that these people were supposed to be humanoid aliens, or creatures of alternate evolution in some parallel universe, but a mention of Latin here pretty much puts paid to the idea that this is not our world, so now I’m puzzled by how these people came to be the way that they are. Melanie Tem’s “Hypernemonic” will be a bit too opaque for many readers to penetrate easily, and Antony Mann’s “The Face Tree” is a rather predictable horror story.

Both issues feature good covers by Jim Burns, the cover for March/April being particularly evocative.

Fritz Leiber’s long-running series of stories about those two oddly matched but swashbuckling rogues, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, are one of the foundation stones of the sword & sorcery subgenre, and their influence has spread not only throughout fantasy, but into other genres as well; in SF, Michael Swanwick’s Darger and Surplus are clearly inspired by them, and I suspect that Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard thrillers may be too. Probably Fafhrd and the Mouser are also one of the inspirations for fantasy’s most recent pair of oddly mismatched adventurers, Garth Nix’s Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, some of whose adventures have just been collected in Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures. Sir Hereward is a fairly standard swashbuckling hero, good with a sword and a dead shot with a pistol (although his being an artillery expert, a Master Gunner, adds an unusual touch), but his companion, Mister Fitz, is an intriguing creation: a thousand-year-old living puppet who is also a very potent sorcerer, wielder of deadly “esoteric needles,” and who brought Sir Hereward up from infancy. This adds a different edge to their relationship, as does the fact that, rather than running into dangerous adventures while searching for treasure, like many heroic fantasy heroes, they are indifferent to treasure, roaming the world seeking out and destroying rogue gods instead, as agents of the mystical Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World. All three stories here are entertaining, although the best of them is probably “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe,” in which the adventurers enlist the aid of pirates to fight a Lovecraftian-like god, an immense man-eating starfish deity.

Like the Nix collection, Eleanor Arnason’s collection, Big Mama Stories, is expensive for a relatively thin volume, but also like the Nix, this is quirky, off-beat stuff that’s unlikely ever to get a regular trade edition, so it’s worth the money to buy them from a small press. In Arnason’s sly, satirical cosmology, Big Mamas are huge primordial beings who walk through space as though strolling across a meadow (although they’re able to vary their size at will, becoming human-sized or even smaller if they want to, although sometimes they’re big enough for spaceships to bump against their ankles), nearly indestructible creatures who also have the power to leap across space and time, so they can just as easily pop up in the Cretaceous as in another Galaxy. This isn’t Arnason at the top of her form, by any means, that would probably be stories in her long-running hwarhath series, but there’s a deliberate Tall Tale or Folk Tale quality to the Big Mama stories which makes them a lot of fun; in her Afterword, Arnason cites inspiration from folk tales about Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, John Henry, Mike Finn, and other folk heroes and says that the stories arose from her desire to try her hand at “space-age tall tales.” Here we get to meet Big Ugly Mama, as well as Big Black Mama, Big Green Mama, Big Red Mama, and Big Brown Mama, as well as Big Poppas of various hues. Arnason occasionally tromps too hard on the Political Message pedal in a few places, but on the whole, the stories are good light-hearted fun, and full of sly physics jokes as well as satirical shout-outs to other science fiction stories. The best of them overall is probably “Big Ugly Mama and the Zk.”

In her Afterword, Arnason wonders if American kids still learn tall tales. Sadly, the answer is no. Kids today draw their folk heroes from cartoons, anime, TV shows, movies, superhero comic books, and computer games, not from the old folk tales. Even from commercials. Everybody knows who the Geiko Gecko is, but probably not one kid in a thousand has ever heard of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill.

John Varley’s reputation has faded a bit in the 21st Century, but he was an important new writer in the ‘70s, injecting new energy and enthusiasm into the field at a time when it was sunk in the dull gray doldrums that had been left behind after the ferocious tempest of the New Wave Era had blown itself out. Varley was one of the first new writers to become interested in the solar system again, after several years in which it had been largely abandoned as a setting for stories because the space probes of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s had “proved” that it was nothing but an “uninteresting” collection of balls of rock and ice, with no available abodes for life—dull as a supermarket parking-lot. Instead, Varley seemed to find the solar system lushly romantic just as it was, lifeless balls of rock and all (and this was even before the later Mariner probes to the Jupiter and Saturn system had proved the solar system to be a lot more surprising than people thought that it was). In retrospect, it’s also clear that his work, along with work by writers like Cordwainer Smith and Frederik Pohl, was a precursor to the Posthuman work of the ‘80s and ‘90s that would be done by people like Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan, Michael Swanwick, Iain Banks, Charles Stross, and many others. The best of Varley’s early stories have been collected in Good-bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, and the best of the stories here, such as “In the Bowl,” “Retrograde Summer,” “Blue Champagne,” “Bagatelee,” and the eponymous title story, deserve a permanent place of honor in the SF pantheon.

I won’t even pretend to be impartial about the work of Paul McAuley. I bought and published lots of it when I was editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and reprinted other stories in my Best of the Year series, both before and after my stint at Asimov’s. Suffice it to say that I consider McAuley to be one of the two or three best writers working in SF today, and some of the stories collected in A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, especially “The Temporary King,” “Gene Wars,” “Recording Angel,” “Second Skin,” “17,” “Sea Change, With Monsters,” “City of the Dead,” and “The Choice” to be among the best science fiction stories published by anyone in this period, not just the best of Paul McAuley.