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Subterranean Online, Summer.

Subterranean Online, Spring.

Asimov’s, June.

Lightspeed, March.

Lightspeed, April.

Beyond the Sun, ed. Bryan Thomas Schmidt. (Fairwood Press, 978-1-933846-38-5, $17.99, 296 pages.) Cover art by Mitchell Davidson Bentley.

Super Stories of Heroes and Villains, ed. Claude Lalumière. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-103-9, $15.95, 432 pages.) Cover art by Elizabeth Story.

The Apes of Wrath, ed. Richard Klaw. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-085-8, $15.95, 384 pages.) Cover art by Alex Solis.

 

K.J. Parker is one of the best fantasy writers working today, so it’s a pleasure to see that the Summer issue of Subterranean Online is a Special K.J. Parker issue, featuring two long stories by Parker. Both are excellent, but the better of the two is probably “The Sun and I,” a novella about a gang of reprobates and con artists who decide to cynically create a religion for profit—with unexpected results. This is smart, edgy, and slyly amusing stuff that reminds me strongly of a classic story by Fritz Leiber with a similar plot, “Lean Times in Lankhmar.” The other Parker story, “Illuminated,” is also first-rate, taking us along with a wizard and a young apprentice to a sinister and abandoned ancient tower to investigate books of arcane knowledge that have been lost and forgotten for generations—this scenario would play out in a familiar fashion in the hands of most other fantasy writers, but not Parker’s, whose version is full of surprises. There’s also a fascinating and erudite non-fiction essay by Parker, “Rich Men’s Skins; A Social History of Armour.” The Summer issue also contains a slipstream fantasy, “The Shoot-Out At Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World,” by Catherynne Valente, a horror/military SF story by Bruce McAllister and W.S. Adams, and horror stories by Joe R. Lansdale and Kat Howard. The best issue of Subterranean so far this year.

The Spring issue of Subterranean Online is not as strong, but does feature elegant fantasy stories by Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell, and Kat Howard, horror stories by Brian Francis Slattery and Caitlin R. Kiernan, and a long, strange mix of metafiction and apocalyptic futuristic horror, “The Indelible Dark,” by William Browning Spencer.

The best story in the June Asimov’s, by a good margin, is “Precious Mental,” by Robert Reed, another in his long-running “Great Ship” series, about a Jupiter-sized spaceship that endlessly travels the Galaxy with millions of passengers from many different races, including humans. This one takes us far from the Great Ship, as an immortal Captain who has lived under an assumed identity for centuries is shanghaied along on a desperate mission to find and salvage a derelict ship that’s been lost for millions of years and where a secret of immense importance is hidden. This is another Reed story where the characters endure a grueling and protracted ordeal, suffering unimaginable hardships over a period of years, including dying and slowly being re-grown from scratch while agonizingly aware of the process the whole time. Reed is very good at describing this kind of prolonged physical ordeal, and I can’t help but wonder if this can be attributed to his passion for long-distance running.

Also good in June is Skylight, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a story about a young girl being trained to join the Assassin’s Guild who realizes, inconveniently, that she doesn’t want to kill anybody, and “The Fountain,” by G. David Nordley, a slow and rather talky, but interesting, story about aliens trying to convince humans that it’s in their own best interest to become involved in a space war to save another race of aliens from yet another race of aliens. Eric Del Carlo’s “Hypervigilant” is a somewhat unconvincing tale of empaths who have been recruited to guard public places like hospitals by spotting people who come in with the intention of shooting everybody, and with Megan Arkenberg’s “A Love Song Concerning His Vineyard,” I just couldn’t get by the premise that anybody would think it would be a commercially viable idea to make wine on Mars and ship it to Earth.

The March Lightspeed contains an interesting and offbeat SF story, “Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince,” by Jake Kerr, which is just what it says it is—a collection of Wikipedia articles and other essays and news pieces about an author who becomes famous some years after an asteroid crashes into the Earth and obliterates most of North America, along with book reviews and critical analysis of his work. This sounds dry, and there’s no actual “plot,” but the picture of life in the Post-Impact society that gradually forms piecemeal fashion is fascinating. The March issue also contains two good fantasy stories, “The Dream Detective,” by Lisa Tuttle, and “The Bolt Tightener,” by Sarona Ulibarri, which is reminiscent of the old tale about The Little Dutch Boy who had to keep the dike from breaking. The April Lightspeed offers another story about people waiting for a dinosaur-killer meteor or asteroid—this one deliberately directed by aliens—to strike the Earth, “Deep Blood Kettle,” by Hugh Howey—this is well-crafted, and the characters have psychological depth, but less interesting than the Kerr, since it basically just depicts people waiting around in the everyday present-day world for the meteor to strike, and thus lacks the intriguing backstory of the other. “Deus Ex Arca,” by Desirina Boskovich, in which a young boy finds a magic box that can do anything but is extremely unpredictable and dangerous to everybody but him, making those who touch it disappear or turn into celery stalks or toasters—this is listed as “SF,” but is really a fantasy. The two admitted fantasies are Karin Tidbeck’s slipstreamish and somewhat surreal “A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain,” and Anaea Lay’s “The Visited,” which actually has more of the flavor of SF in spite of being listed as a fantasy, in which a Jim Morrison-like performer draws the inspiration for his music from a mysterious Visitation in which enigmatic creatures appeared to everyone in the world.

There’s nothing really exceptional in Beyond the Sun, a mixed original/reprint anthology edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, but it is a fun read, with some solid core SF work, although a similar concept was explored better last year by Jonathan Strahan’s Edge of Infinity. The theme appeals to me, as stories of exploration and adventure in space beyond the bounds of Earth remain one of the foundation stones of SF, in my opinion, but don’t expect to find hard science and rigorously worked-out physics here, as this isn’t that kind of book; instead, it belongs to the old Pulp Adventure school, where spaceships flit between planets in days and sometimes even hours, and there are lots of exotic alien races to interact with and/or battle with. The best of the original stories here is probably Nancy Kress’s “Migration,” a compelling look at the power instinct can hold over even the most rational minds, but also good are Brad R. Torgersen’s “The Bricks of Eta Cassiopeiae,” Jaleta Clegg’s “One-Way Ticket to Paradise,” and Nancy Fulda’s “A Soaring Pillar Of Brightness,” and there is also solid work by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Cat Rambo, Mike Resnick, and others, as well as good reprint stories by Robert Silverberg and Jason Sanford.

A few months back I reviewed Rich Horton’s superhero anthology Superheroes here, and now here’s another one, Super Stories of Heroes and Villains, a reprint anthology edited by Claude Lalumière. Like the Horton anthology, the stories here divide roughly into stories that handle the superhero idea straightforwardly, taking the premise seriously, as superhero comic books do, or satirically, pointing out the absurdities of the mode, or that cross the superhero meme with other kinds of story in an interstitial, postmodern fashion. The balance here tips more toward the satirical/postmodern side of the scale, which may make Horton’s anthology a bit more satisfying for superhero fans than Lalumière’s, but there is some good material of either sort in the book. The best stories here are Kelly Link’s sly and deliciously postmodern “Origin Story” and Kim Newman’s somber and even moving “Übermensch!”, but also good are “The Biggest,” by James Patrick Kelly, “The Detective of Dreams,” by Gene Wolfe, “The Super Man and the Bugout,” by Cory Doctorow, and “Grandma,” by Carol Emshwiller, as well as good work by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Rachel Pollack, Leah Bobet, Tim Pratt, and others. The anthology also features a fascinating “Prologue” and some “Interludes” by George R.R. Martin from the first volume in the long-running Wild Cards series of superhero anthologies (perhaps the first anthology of prose superhero stories, from all the way back in 1987), and a Wild Cards story by Carrie Vaughn.

Another offbeat and interesting reprint anthology is The Apes of Wrath, edited by Richard Klaw, SF/fantasy stories about gorillas, chimps, orangutans, and other sorts of apes, many of whom have been raised to human intelligence by scientific means or whose bodies have had human brains (or at least human minds) transferred into them, some about apes who remain apes and their interactions with humanity, and, inevitably, a couple of stories about King Kong. The anthology has a spine of classical ape stories by writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and even out-of-genre writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Aesop, but the best stories here are the more recently-published ones, such as Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” about a little girl who has her consciousness transferred into the body of a chimpanzee, Leigh Kennedy’s “Her Furry Face,” an unsettling story about a scientist’s ill-advised attempt to take his affectionate relationship with an orangutan he’s studying a bit too far, and Philip Jose Farmer’s “After King Kong Fell,” which retells the rampage of King Kong and its aftermath from the perspective of an old man looking back on the night of terror he experienced as a child. There are also good stories here by Karen Joy Fowler, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Waldrop, and others, and non-fiction articles by Jess Nevins, Scott A. Cupp, and Rick Klaw, examining the role of the ape in, respectively, literature, comics, and the movies, and one by Mark Finn about performers and stuntmen who have worn the “gorilla suit” onstage and on the screen. (I’m mildly disappointed that the editors didn’t include Robert Silverberg’s “The Pope of the Chimps,” one of the best modern ape stories; this would have been a perfect opportunity to reprint it.)