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Asimov’s, August.

Asimov’s, September.

Asimov’s, October/November.

Analog, September.

F&SF, November/December

 

The mid-year issues of Asimov’s, August, September, October/November, are a bit weak overall, although there are good stories scattered across all three issues. The best story in the September Asimov’s, and one of the best stories that Asimov’s has published all year, is “The Discovered Country,” by Ian R. MacLeod, an evocative and emotionally powerful story of someone sent on a mission to a Virtual Utopia reserved only for the superrich who have died on our mundane Earth, a sort-of literal Afterlife, where they exist in unbelievable luxury at the expense of those still living in the flesh back in physical reality, whose resources they gobble to support their own Virtual Paradise. This is a smart, tense, and tricky story where the stakes are high and nothing is what it seems. Also good in September is “A Stranger from a Foreign Ship,” by veteran author Tom Purdom, another tense and tricky story about an actual “identity thief,” one with the ability to leap from body to body, temporarily displacing the person whose body it is; the tension is generated when he comes up against the limits of his peculiar talent in a life-or-death situation, and must figure out ways to use the trick to his best advantage in order to survive. New writer Jay O’Connell tells a rather sweet and refreshingly hopeful story about a human and an alien negotiating about the future of the human race in “That Universe We Both Dreamed Of,” and new writer Benjamin Crowell explores internet anti-piracy measures taken to an outrageous but perversely logical length in “A Hole in the Ether,” a story that reminds me strongly of Gordon R. Dickson’s famous story “Computers Don’t Argue.” Ian Creasey explores many of the same issues of privilege and immortality as MacLeod did in “The Discovered Country” in his own “The Unparrallel’d Death-Defying Feats of Astoundo, Escape Artist Extraordinaire,” but in a less satisfying and more perfervid way. On the whole, the September issue is probably the strongest of the three issues we’re discussing here.

The lead story in the August Asimov’s is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s big novella, set in her long-running Diver Universe series, “The Application of Hope.” This is brisk and entertaining, as are all of the Diver stories, and as is Rusch’s work in general, in fact—but the backstory of the Diver Universe has grown so complicated after many stories and novels that the novella probably losses something if you’re not already familiar with that backstory, and it comes across more as a chunk of a novel than as a story that really stands independently on its own feet. (Much the same could be said about Rusch’s other Diver story, “Encounter on Starbase Kappa,” in the October/November issue.) Also in August, Jack Skillingstead turns in a story that would make a pretty good Twilight Zone episode, about a pilot whose life is changed forever by blundering into a Bermuda Triangle-like hole in space over the Cascade Mountains, in “Arlington,” and new writer Leah Thomas’s “The Ex-Corporal” is a compelling but somewhat unpleasant read, one with disturbing undertones of child abuse never brought quite all the way up to the surface.

There are a lot of stories in Asimov’s October/November issue, the Double Issue, and although few of them are really bad, few are really exceptional either—it’s an issue of solid core SF work (with a few fantasy stories thrown in) of good but not first-rate quality, and I think that little here is likely to make it on to next year’s award ballots. The best story here is probably Neal Asher’s “Memories of Earth,” another story in his Owner series, like “The Other Gun” from the April/May issue; the backstory of this series is also complex, but “Memories of Earth,” set towards the end of the Owner’s story, seems to stand up on its own feet as an independent unit better than Rusch’s “The Application of Hope” did. Also good in October/November is Jack Dann’s “Waiting for Medusa,” a clever homage to Harlan Ellison’s famous story “A Boy and His Dog.” Ian McHugh’s “When the Rain Comin” is a nicely done far-future slice-of-life story, although I have some doubts that the ecosystem could really work that way. Joel Richards’s “Deep Diving” is an entertaining murder mystery story, set on an interstellar luxury liner, spoiled to some extent by the unnecessary and unlikely addition of an uncontrollable robot Fury into the plot. Sheila Finch’s “A Very Small Dispensation” is a melancholy but ultimately rather touching fable about a woman’s inevitable encounter with Death. Gregory Frost’s “No Others Are Genuine” pits a small boy against the sinister inhabitants of a boarding house. James Sallis returns to Asimov’s after a 28-year absence (!) with “As Yet Untitled,” a sly metafictional piece about a pulp-story character reluctantly forced to change genres. Ian Creasey’s “Within These Well-Scrubbed Walls” is really only SF by courtesy, since almost exactly the same story could be told without the thin fantastic element of the hologram. Charlie Jane Anders’s “The Time Travel Club” is an odd mixture of a satirical comedy-of-manners about a knockabout group of misfits who seek each other out and form a social club and a time-travel tale, which mix a bit uneasily.

The September Analog is the strongest issue of Analog of the year to date, featuring three first-rate stories and a couple of “merely” good ones. Martin L. Shoemaker’s novella “Murder on the Aldrin Express” is another murder mystery set on a spaceship, but this one avoids the mistakes that marred Joel Richards’s “Deep Diving,” keeping the focus strongly on believable future technology and not throwing in anomalous elements like telepaths and vengeful killer robots, and giving us an ingenious and classically satisfying mystery to unravel, peopled with vivid characters who are convincing as real people, with all their varying strengths, weakness, and foibles. Alec Nevala-Lee’s “The Whale God” is SF only by the thinnest of margins, depicting the unexpected results of secret military experimentation during the Vietnam War, but is a fascinating and finely crafted study of a historical period and of a clash of widely differing cultures and mindsets as extreme as that between aliens and Earthmen in much core science fiction, and a hopeful one in that with good will and effort on both sides, at least a partial understanding of each other’s view of the world is reached. Lavie Tidhar’s “The Oracle” is another of his Central Station stories, set in a complex, busy, multi-cultural future milieu full of biologically engineered creatures and amalgams of humans and machines of one sort of another, and while it wouldn’t look out-of-place in Asimov’s or Interzone, it sticks out like a sore thumb in Analog, where little like it has ever been published before. (It’s dangerous to attribute new types of material showing up in a magazine to a new editor, in this case, Trevor Quachri; for all we know, these stories might have been bought by previous editor Stanley Schmidt and been sitting in the Analog inventory for some time before he retired. That’s not the way I would bet it, though, particularly with the Tidhar story. If I’m right, it’s good to see Quacrhi making his mark on the magazine, always a difficult thing to do with a long-established title.) Also good in the September issue is Joe Pitkin’s “Full Fathom Five,” a melancholy and surprisingly subtle story about an explorer encountering an unknown alien creature while stranded beneath miles of ice in the oceans of Europa. Liz J. Anderson’s “Creatures from a Blue Lagoon” is a more typical Analog story, but a well-handled one.

The lead story in the October/November issue of F&SF is Michael Blumlein’s big novella, “Success.” This is extremely well-crafted line by line, and paints a compelling portrait of a somewhat distasteful character, but I must admit that I found it almost entirely cryptic, and put the story down at the end with little real understanding of what had happened in it, or why or how it had. If you’re a more subtle reader, you may get more out of it. The story I liked the best in this issue was Brendan DuBois’s “Hard Stars,” a tense look at a disquieting but disturbingly plausible future where the tables have been turned and the United States is being hit daily by hundreds of deadly drone strikes launched by foreign enemies, targeting any sort of electronic signal—which makes our technological civilization almost impossible to maintain. Also good in the October/November issue is Tim Sullivan’s “Through Mud One Picks a Way,” a story about one woman’s struggle to avert the genocide of an alien race, a story which reminds me of Avram Davidson’s “Now Let Us Sleep,” although the situation at the end of the story is less hopeless than it is in the Davidson, with the woman continuing the struggle. In “Stones and Glass,” Matthew Hughes gives us another sly adventure of the thief and con man Raffalon, set in a world very like that of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth in flavor, M.K Hobson tells us a strange fable of mythological creatures interacting with starving Russian soldiers during World War II in “Baba Makosh,” and this issue’s Albert E. Cowdrey story (it seems like there’s been a Cowdrey story in almost every issue of F&SF this year), “Hell For Company,” lets us eavesdrop on a story being told by Mark Twain about a peculiar case of demonic possession.