Interzone 249.
Asimov’s, December.
Extreme Planets, ed. David Conyers, David Kernot, Jeff Harris. (Chaosium Inc.) Cover art by Paul Drummond.
Rayguns Over Texas, ed. Richard Klaw. (FACT, Inc., 978-0-9892706-0-1, $16.99, 331). Cover art by Rocky Kelley.
Electric Velocipede 26.
Electric Velocipede 27.
After a couple of weak issues, Interzone ends the year with a strong one, Interzone 249. Best story here is probably John Shirley’s “The Kindest Man in Stormland,” which takes place in a U.S. ravaged by extreme climate change, and follows a private investigator in search of a fugitive murderer to a Charleston, South Carolina swamped by rising seas and battered by perpetual storms. The unending fixed-in-place storms of Stormland are perhaps a bit unlikely, but Shirley evokes this milieu well, especially in showing how the surviving residents of Charleston have of necessity adapted to life under radically changed conditions, and there is some nice suspense and a few surprising twists. Also good here is Lavie Tidhar’s “Filaments,” one of his Central Station stories, set in a dense, evocative, multi-cultural future centered around an immense interplanetary spaceport; this is perhaps one of the more minor stories in the sequence, but does a nice job in describing the crisis of faith and eventual epiphany experienced by R. Brother Patch-It, the battered old robot priest in change of the Church of Robot mission in Central Station. In “Trans-Siberia: An Account of a Journey,” new writer Sarah Dodd evocatively describes a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad across a 19th Century Russia that seems to have suffered a Lovecraftian incursion and is now haunted by strange and deadly monsters of various kinds who swirl menacingly around the train; this doesn’t really hold up to rational analysis after the fact—how do they maintain the tracks across such dangerous territory, and how could they have built the line across it in the first place?—but Dodd invokes the scene effectively for the duration of the ride, and I’m not sure you’re suppose to question it rationally in the first place. Jason Sanford’s “Paprika” takes us into the very distant future, almost to the end of time, for the fairytale-like story of an old toymaker and the “time angel” tasked with preserving his life’s memories in a virtual surround. Tim Lees tells an evocative if slipstreamish tale of a man endlessly searching the back roads of America for a small town that doesn’t appear on any map, in “Unknown Cities of America.” And new writer Claire Humphrey, in “Haunts,” a story to me strongly reminiscent of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, gives us a well-handled fantasy story about a female dueling master dedicated to her Art to the point of obsession, but kept prisoner, in a literal fashion, by the ghosts of the past. All in all, a strong issue.
Asimov’s ends its year with an uneven December issue, although one that has some very good stuff in it. The best story in the December Asimov’s, by a substantial margin, is Ian R. MacLeod’s “Entangled,” one of the best stories to appear in Asimov’s this year, and one of the best stories of the year in general. This one takes us to the near-future for the poignant story of a woman who lives alone and isolated, cut off from everyone else—even if they’re in the same room with her. Also good in December is “Bloom,” by new writer Gregory Norman Bossert, which gives us a tense, suspenseful story about explorers on a distant world who blunder into an alien lifeform that will kill them if they move. New writer Henry Lien takes us to an unlikely future society in “Pearl Rehabilitive Colony for Ungrateful Daughters” for the entertaining story of a young girl sent to an academy where they train recalcitrant girls in a peculiar martial art, and her continuing rebellion against Authority even while there. R. Neube’s “Grainers” is another in his long-running series about interplanetary refugees who live a desperate life on grainships that shuffle endlessly around the Solar System. Nancy Kress’s “Frog Watch” is fairly minor Kress, certainly one of the less substantial Kress stories of the several that have appeared this year—but, like all Nancy Kress stories, it is entertaining, professionally crafted, and worth a read.
Extreme Planets, edited by David Conyers, David Kernot, and Jeff Harris is another of the original SF anthologies from ultra-small presses that have come out this year; this one features stories set on “alien worlds that push the limits of what we once believe possible in a planetary environment.” There’s nothing really exceptional here, although the anthology does contain a lot of solid, entertaining, core SF. The best story here, by a good margin, is “Giants,” by Peter Watts, a direct sequel to his well-known story “The Island”—this is full of typical Wattsian invention, intensity, and audacity, but may be difficult to follow if you haven’t read “The Island” first. Also good here are “The Hyphal Layer,” by Meryl Ferguson, about a crisis that hits a harvesting station floating on an algae-rich sea, “The Seventh Generation,” by Brian Stableford (a rare appearance these days by an author who was once one of the most prolific of all SF writers at short lengths), which investigates the final evolution of life on Earth, long after humans are gone, and in “Haumea,” David Nordley retells the story of the Captain Bligh mutiny, recast as a tale of space travelers abandoned on an airless asteroid, and works out a clever way for them to rescue themselves. The anthology also contains interesting work by Jay Caselberg, David Brin and Gregory Benford, Jeff Hecht, Stephen Gaskell, and others. I’ve only seen an ebook of this title; a trade paperback was announced, but I can’t find it on Amazon (or the ebook either, for that matter). For information, try going to www.chaosium.com.
In spite of the title, implying freewheeling Space Opera, there’s only one raygun to be found in Rayguns Over Texas, an original anthology edited by Richard Klaw; most stories here don’t even take us off Earth, and most don’t have anything to do with aliens (attacking or otherwise) or armadas of battling spaceships. That doesn’t mean that the anthology isn’t fun, though. Like Extreme Planets, there’s nothing here that’s going to show up on next year’s award ballots, nothing really exceptional, but there’s lots of enjoyable reading, although only a few of the stories could really be called science fiction by most classical definitions, let alone the hard science fiction aspired to by some of the stories in Extreme Planets. Most of the Big Names of the loosely defined school of Texas SF—Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley, Lisa Tuttle, Lewis Shiner—aren’t represented here with fiction (Sterling provides an Introduction), but the writers who are represented here do a decent job of delivering that difficult-to-classify stuff typical of the Texas School of SF, somewhere between Gonzo Fantasy and Horror in tone with occasional touches of Cyberpunk, that was once called “Outlaw Fantasy,” or occasionally “Cowpunk.” The most enjoyable story here is probably Mark Finn’s “Take a Left at the Cretaceous,” in which Good Ole Boy long-distance truckers tangle with dinosaurs, but there’s other fun stuff as well; Lawrence Person contributes a new example of the (rarely seen these days) Psychedelic Drug Story with “Novel Properties of Certain Complex Alkaloids”; Aaron Allston tells a sly but rousing tale of small-town Texas lawmen fighting off an incursion of alien reptiloids (this is where that raygun appears, although it never leaves the ground), in “Defenders of Belman County”; Derek Austin Johnson details an embarrassing Industrial Accident in “Gray Goo and You”; Chris N. Brown tells a cyberpunkish tale of wheelers-and-dealers outmaneuvering each other in a Climate Change-ravaged Texas in “Sovereign Wealth”; and Jessica Reisman takes us to an even more Climate Change ravaged world for the story of a reluctant seer in “The Chambered Eye.” There are also stories by Neal Barrett, Jr, Joe R. Lansdale, Bradley Denton, Michael Moorcock, Don Webb, and others, plus the aforementioned Introduction by Bruce Sterling, an essay by Scott A. Cupp, and Appendixes of Texas writers and artists.
The long-running fiction semiprozine Electric Velocipede, edited by John Kilma, is shutting down shop, and it went out with two last issues this year, Electric Velocipede 26 and Electric Velocipede 27, each of which contained one of the best stories of the year. The highlight of Electric Velocipede 26 is a subtle and wonderfully lyrical story by Irish writer, about the possibility of going home again even if it’s not your home, something faced by an astronaut performing a melancholy duty, in “The Irish Astronaut.” Also good in Electric Velocipede 26 are stories by Jamie Killen, James Alan Gardner, and E. Catherine Tobler. The best story in Electric Velocipede 27, the magazine’s final issue, is “The Beasts We Want To Be,” by new writer Sam J. Miller, a dark, brutal story of the kind of men produced by harrowing conditioning sessions with Skinner Boxes and electroshock therapy in an Alternate Russia just after the Communist Revolution, and how those men struggle to reconcile what they have become with what they once were. Electric Velocipede 27 also contains good work by Lisa L. Hannett and Geoffrey W. Cole. So farewell, Electric Velocipede; you always maintained a high standard of literary quality, and you’ll be missed.