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Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, eds. J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett. (Tor, 978-0-7653-3458-9, $25.99, 416 pages.)

F&SF, July/August.

Asimov’s, April/May.

Tor.com, June 19.

Tor.com, July 3.

Tor.com, July 10.

Tor.com, July 11.

Tor.com, July 17.

 

Gene Wolfe was recently named as a Grandmaster by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and few would argue with that evaluation. Wolfe is certainly one of the best writers to enter the science fiction/fantasy fields in the last half of the 20th Century, and some critics have argued that he’s one of the best writers in American letters in that period, never mind restricting it to science fiction. One has gone as far as to call Wolfe “the greatest writer in the English language alive today.”

Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, edited by J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett, is a tribute anthology in which various of his colleagues attempt to write stories reminiscent of Wolfe’s work in style and substance and even provide their own takes on his worlds and characters. Unfortunately, Wolfe’s own work has set that bar very high, and many of the writers here aren’t really up to clearing it, with the result that Shadows of the New Sun is overall rather weak—although there are good to excellent stories here—and generally somewhat disappointing; even the two stories by Wolfe himself that are included are minor Wolfe.

The best story in Shadows of the New Sun, by a fair margin, is “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin,” by Michael Swanwick, in which Swanwick spins off of my favorite Wolfe story, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” to produce one of the few stories in the anthology that feels like it actually might have been written by Wolfe himself. David Drake also does a good job of producing a stylistically credible sequel to Wolfe’s little-known story “Straw” in his “Bedding,” Neil Gaiman is suitably lyrical and enigmatic in “A Lunar Labyrinth,” and Aaron Allston in “Epistoleros” produces one of the few stories here that approaches a Wolfean level of slyness and literary trickery. Other stories here, such as Jack Dann’s “The Island of Time” and Nancy Kress’s “...And Other Stories,” are perfectly satisfactory as stories, but don’t strike me as convincingly Wolfean. Much the same could be said about stories by Joe Haldeman, David Brin, and Jody Lynn Nye.

(If you’re interested, The Book of the New Sun is the setting from Wolfe’s work most drawn upon here, unsurprisingly enough, and Severian is the Wolfe character most frequently represented, although “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” gets used a lot too, and there are stories drawing upon Soldier in the Mist, Peace, and other Wolfe works as well.)

The strongest story in an uneven July/August issue of F&SF is Eleanor Arnason’s long novelette “Kormak the Lucky,” which traces the journey of the eponymous protagonist from being a slave of an embittered Norse patriarch in Iceland to being a slave of the Elves in Iceland, and then tells how he eventually gains his freedom after a dangerous mission to the Irish Fairyland. I thought that the sequences in the Fairy Subway System that takes Kormak from Iceland to Ireland dragged a bit, but other than that, this is a strong story, and one of the more interesting fantasy stories of the year so far, drawing on mythological traditions we don’t often see employed. Ken Atabef also draws upon rarely-tapped mythological traditions in “The Woman Who Married the Snow,” a zombie story of sorts set among the Inuit, and where the dominant mood is not one of horror but rather of sadness and regret.

“The Year of the Rat,” by Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu, is a compelling, if somewhat fuzzy, story of failed students in a near-future China impressed into military service against an invasion of rats. The military stuff, detailing the relationships that work themselves out between the soldiers in the unit, is familiar from other such stories but well-handled and traditionally satisfying, but the story’s “fuzzy” because I was never entirely sure what the “rats” were actually supposed to be; at times, they seemed like artificially created chimeras of some sort, at other times perhaps clones or even foreigners, at other times actual rats whose intelligence had been biologically enhanced, at other times just rats; what happens and why at the end of the story is a bit unclear as well. New writer Adam Rakunas’s first sale, “Oh Give Me a Home,” also tells a story about genetically modified animals, mini-bison, in this case, and an interfering government that wants to seize and destroy them; it’s quite entertaining, but Rakuna really only tells half a story here, stopping just when problems are multiplying for the embattled hero and things are just starting to get really interesting. Tim Sullivan’s “The Nambu Egg” tells an engaging story about an elaborately plotted—and perhaps somewhat unlikely—revenge, set in an interstellar society, the only story in the issue that takes us off Earth. KJ Kabza and Harry R. Campion tell fairy-tale-like fabulations, Harvey Jacobs and Oliver Buckram are here with short joke stories, and Rus Wornom is here with a long joke story, too long, in fact, a jokey Lovecraft pastiche called “In the Mountains of Frozen Fire.”

The lead story in the April/May Asimov’s, “The Other Gun,” by Neal Asher, is a typical Asher story: fast-paced, ultraviolent, grim, sometimes gruesome, and thoroughly entertaining, although the backstory here is complex enough that you might have difficulty following the action if you’re not already familiar with recent novels set in Asher’s “Owner” universe. Karl Bunker’s “Gray Wings” is a quiet but poignant demonstration that we are likely to be divided into the Haves and Have-Nots even in an opulent high-tech future. Colin P. Davies’s “Julian of Earth” takes us to a distant planet for an intriguing study of the relationship between myth and reality, expectation and actuality. Tom Purdom’s “Warlord” is a direct sequel to last year’s “Golva’s Ascent,” which, along with 2010’s “Warfriends,” continues the story begun in Purdom’s 1966 novel Tree Lord of Imaten—this is intelligent, old-fashioned pulp adventure SF of a sort rarely seen these days, with a human leading a struggle between warring races of aliens, one group allied with a group of ruthless human renegades, and although there is, unsurprisingly, a lot of combat here, Purdom, typically, is actually more interested in the strategy and tactics employed in the battle than in the details of the combat itself, and also does an excellent job of giving us a feeling for the confusion and chaos involved in even a small-scale battle, let alone one featuring masses of troops.

Ken Liu’s “The Oracle” is a variant on the idea behind Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” about precognition allowing authorities to punish crimes before they happen; here, the question becomes, do you dare to allow yourself to fall in love, knowing that one day a lover (exact identity unknown) will kill you? Linda Nagata’s “Through Your Eyes” is the story of a privileged but politically unaware young man who gets inadvertently caught up in the reaction of a Surveillance Society to a political demonstration—so close to the situation today, unfortunately, that it’s SF only by the thinnest of margins. Leah Cypess’s “Distant Like the Stars” is about a young woman so resentful of the fact that she can never get away from her dominating mother in a society where cheap and easy teleportation Doorways are commonplace that she flees to the ends of the universe to find a place where the teleportation network hasn’t yet reached—it never seems to occur to her that it would be a lot easier to say, “Fuck off, Mom!” instead. Naomi Kritzer’s “The Wall” is a clever time-travel story where the time-travel turns out to be motivated by the most personal of reasons rather than for vast political or social ones. Joel Davis’s “Writing in the Margins” give us an unlikely society where reincarnation has been proven to be a fact, and people kill themselves to get out of unpleasant situations and on to the next life. And Alan Wall’s “Spider God and the Periodic Table” starts out like a high-tech mystery, but turns out to be a Stealth Fantasy about a Lovecraftian Incursion instead.

There were a rush of good stories at Tor.com in July. Perhaps the best of these, and one of the best things published by Tor.com this year, is “The Best We Can,” by Carrie Vaughn, from July 17, a quiet but moving story about an all-too-plausible reaction to the age-old dream of First Contact. Also excellent is Nancy Kress’s novella “One,” also from July 17, about a battered and embittered professional boxer who finds, initially to his chagrin, that he’s developing what amounts to a superpower, a sort of super-empathy that allows him to read body-language with such pinpoint accuracy that it’s almost like being able to read minds; and that’s only the beginning of his journey, for both better and worse. Also good, from July 11, is Ken Liu’s “The Plague,” reprinted from Nature magazine’s Futures series, a short, sharp shocker demonstrating how people are kept apart as much by their preconceptions as by the mutual incompatibilities of their environments. Susan Palwick’s “Homecoming,” from July 10, is a smart, well-crafted fantasy that merges the story of the sirens and their supernaturally alluring calls with the story of the girl who disguises herself as a boy and follows her man to sea, with some intriguing twists along the way. Marissa K. Lingen’s “The Ministry of Changes,” from July 3, depicts an embattled society that is slowly losing an endless war in spite of its ability to peer into the future. Ben Burgis’s “Contains Multitudes,” also from July 17, deals with teenagers who play host to alien invaders and who find it hard to resist the ultimate temptation. Lavie Tidhar’s vivid and unusual fantasy, “Dragonkin,” also from July 17, is, like Eleanor Arnason’s “Kormac the Lucky,” one of the best fantasy stories published so far this year. Also good, and different from the ordinary run of fantasy stories, is Veronica Schanoes’s dark fantasy novella about a witch struggling to survive in 19th Century Poland, “Burning Girls,” from June 19.