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Subterranean, Winter.

Asimov’s, January.

F&SF, January/February.

 

Electronic magazine Subterranean starts the year with a Winter issue guest-edited by Jonathan Strahan. There’s lots of good fantasy stories here, but little SF—something of a disappointment for me, since Strahan is one of today’s active editors with the best understanding of and appreciation for core science fiction. Still, with that cavet, he’s produced a strong issue. The best story here is K.J. Parker’s “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There,” a sly and knowing story of characters attempting to outsmart and out-con each other, in typical Parker fashion, and a lesson in the dangers, some unexpected, of trying to get something for nothing. Eleanor Arnason tells another sly story in “The Scrivner,” a retelling of classic fairy tales with deliberate anachronistic elements and a wink-wink breaking of the fourth wall, sort of like a more-intelligent and less cartoonish version of a Fractured Fairy Tale; the voice of the author here, clearly acknowledging that she is the author, in the midst of telling you a tale, is pleasant and persuasive. In “Caligo Lane,” Ellen Klages takes us to San Francisco during World War II for the quiet but ultimately moving story of a woman trying to aid refugees to escape from the danger zone in her own peculiar way. Jeffery Ford spins an elegant fantasy about a young artist reluctantly accepting a commission to paint a portrait of the Devil, with unfortunate consequences, in “The Prelate’s Commission.” Karen Joy Fowler’s chilling, enigmatic “Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story” seems to be about doppelgangers and the difficulty of telling which is the “real” one, narrated from the Point Of View of a child whose baby-sitter is slowly trying to turn herself into her absent mother...but there is a question as to whether the child herself is a doppelganger, or her twin sister is; what’s happening and why is never clearly resolved, but the story generates a palpable feeling of sinister menace. Something terrible is about to happen—or perhaps already has.

In the issue’s one SF story, Greg Egan tells what ultimately turns into a rather compelling story of what it feels like to realize that you’re trapped as one of the “Bit Players” in a computer game and what you can do to alter your fate while still working within the constraints of the game, but it starts off slowly, and I found it a bit hard to believe that a woman’s first actions upon awakening in a strange place not knowing who she was would be to rigorously work out the physical laws of her surroundings by trial-and-error experimentation, without even first bothering to ask her companion how she’d gotten there or where she was; maybe Greg Egan would react like this, but most of us wouldn’t. The longest story here is Bruce Sterling’s “crusaderpunk” story, “Pilgrims of the Round World,” one of the few Bruce Sterling stories that I’ve ever found a bit dull; it’s clearly supposed to be an arch comedy of manners, but unless you can manage to catch more of the in-jokes than I did and figure out which real-life historical figures the characters are supposed to be (and what happened to them afterward), you might find this a bit slow at this length too. “Hayfever,” by Frances Hardinge, turns out to be an elaborate Shaggy Dog joke; although ostensibly SF as well, it’s too comic-bookish to really take seriously as such.

Asimov’s starts out its year with an uneven January issue that nevertheless has some strong material in it, The best stories in the January issue are Nancy Kress’s “The Common Good” and Aliette de Bodard’s “Memorials.” The Kress is a sequel to her 2008 story “The Kindness of Strangers,” in which aliens have disappeared 80% of the human race and subsequently set up mysterious compounds, guarded by force fields, into which they accept a few of the surviving human children. “The Common Good” takes us into one of the alien compounds for a look at what the aliens are up to and what their motivations for near-genocide may have been; this is a mature work in which all of the characters, including the aliens, are painted in shades of gray, and there are no easy answers. The de Bodard is another in her long series of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far-future of an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires. This one deals with a world where refugees from a bitter war have been settled on another world, where they form a despised sub-class and live in ghetto-like enclaves, and with a young woman who becomes embroiled in the risky business of obtaining life-memory recordings from the survivors of the war and smuggling them into a Virtual Reality Monument that recreates life in the vanished civilization, which in turn embroils her in a web of lies and deception where nobody’s motive is quite what it seems to be. Also good in January is “The Extracted Journal Notes for an Ethnography of Bnebene Nomand Culture,” by Ian McHugh, drawn from field notes of an ethnographer studying a tribe of nomadic vegetable people on a distant planet; the aliens are something like Tolkien’s Ents studied through a more-rigorously science fictional perspective, more authentically alien than the humanoid aliens in most SF, and the story effectively demonstrates the gulf of misunderstanding and mistaken cultural assumptions that could exist between sentient species, even those making a good-will effort to bridge the gap.

The rest of the stories in January are somewhat weaker. Ron Collin’s “Primes” is a clever story of some of the unexpected consequences of a technology that can manipulate the neural interfaces of consumers, placing near-subliminal advertisements directly into their brains—an all-too-likely future development, and one I look forward to with a sinking feeling of dread. William Jablowsky’s “Static” is a melancholy reconfirmation of the idea that it’s probably better not to know what’s going to happen in the future. And Steve Rasnic Tem’s “The Carl Paradox” is a time-travel farce, of the sort where future versions of the same person keep knocking on the door, with hilarity ensuing.

Much the same could be said about the January/February F&SF—an uneven issue, with nevertheless some strong stories in it...although I think that, on balance, the January Asimov’s has the edge.

The most substantial story in the January/February issue is probably new writer Seth Chambers’s novella “In Her Eyes,” a steamy romance (with a lot more explicit sex than is usual in the genre these days) between an introverted young man and a flamboyant young woman who is revealed to be a shape-changer (this shouldn’t really be a spoiler, since a reference to “Morphlings” is dropped early on, and I doubt it’s going to come as a surprise after that, although the author drags out the reveal long after it’s going to be obvious to most readers what’s going on). This seems to be present-day Chicago (I’ve even eaten in the restaurant they have their first date in) with no real change from our own world except that the existence of “Morphlings” or “Polymorphs” is accepted as a fact by everyone, although not everybody is happy about it. The “science” explaining Polymorphs is on a comic-book level, involving bathing yourself with gamma radiation with a handy device in the bathroom—most younger readers will probably immediately think of the X-Men’s Mystique, and the shapeshifter’s abilities here are on a similar improbable level, although Chambers at least makes a point of emphasizing how difficult, unpleasant, and painful it is to change from one form to another. If the premise can’t really be taken seriously as plausible science fiction, the strength of the story is in the relationship between the hapless human narrator and his shapeshifting lover, which is intriguing, challenging, and ultimately compelling. At the end, the story darkens, and brings up some interesting questions of identity, and ends on a poignant note.

Another story in the January/February F&SF about a man with a shapeshifting lover, although with considerably less emphasis on the sex itself, is Albert E. Cowdrey’s somewhat autumnal “Out of the Deeps,” which is as much about losing the world of your vanished youth as it is about anything else. This is more somber and less comic than the usual Cowdrey story, a noir thriller that doesn’t really need the supernatural shapeshifter element, and might have been better off without it—without the fantasy element, I could easily see this appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Another story about losing the world of your youth, except that in this case it’s the whole present-day world and modern civilization that is lost, abandoned by having the majority of people flee into Virtual Reality Surrounds, is “For All of Us Down Here,” by Alex Irvine; I still find this now-familiar scenario unlikely, but Irvine avoids most of the problems with it by keeping the focus tightly on a young boy accustomed to living in a diminished world of patched-together and improvised technology resorted to by those left behind, and delivers a satisfying story, although one that perhaps ends a bit abruptly, with important questions left unanswered.

In “The New Cambrian,” Andy Stewart tells a claustrophobic story about the first expedition to Europa, although I suspect that the harrowing events that bedevil the protagonist are really in his mind, scenarios conjured by guilt and loneliness, since I see no plausible way for them to actually happen in the real world (including the first-person narrator dying at the end, a trope that’s become all too common these days). C.C. Finlay tells an entertaining Weird Western in “The Man Who Hanged Three Times.” Robert Reed delivers one of his rare disappointments in “We Don’t Mean to Be.” Claudio Chillemi and Paul Di Filippo collaborate on an Alternate World War II story that disappointingly turns into an absurd comic-book Steampunk extravaganza, in “The Via Pansiperna Boys in ‘Operation Harmony.’” Weaker stories in the issue include “The Lion Wedding,” by Moria Crone (another human-shapeshifter romance, this one an ambiguous fantasy), Bruce Jay Friedman’s metaficional farce (similar in some respects to Eleanor Arnason’s “The Scrivener,” but less entertaining) “The Story-Teller,” and Oliver Buckram’s too-broad and much too long comedy about shenanigans in a mysterious museum, “The Museum of Error.”