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Asimov’s, February.

Clarkesworld, January.

Clarkesworld, February.

Lightspeed, January.

Lightspeed, February.

Tor.com, January 8.

Tor.com, January 22.

Tor.com, February 5.

 

The February issue of Asimov’s is a somewhat weak one overall. The most interesting story here is probably new writer Derek Künsken’s “Schools of Clay,” one of a small subgenre of SF stories that have no human characters whatsoever in them; instead, all the characters are robot-like hive-creatures, something like mechanical bees, their origin never explained (although you could speculate that they started out, ages before, as Von Neumann machines, perhaps intended to be used for mining asteroids), who are preparing to abandon the asteroid that serves as their current hive in the face of an imminent attack by predatory wasp-like mechanical creatures. The Queens and their Princes will launch themselves on a migration to establish new hives elsewhere, while the majority of ordinary workers will be left behind to die. One of the oppressed workers starts a revolution against the status quo, and manages to join the migration himself, where he faces danger both from the wasp-like attackers and from opposition to his being there from the aristocracy of his own kind. Künsken manages to generate a fair amount of sympathy for the plight of his downtrodden robot Lenin and a good deal of suspense as to whether he’s going to be able to figure out a way to survive or not, although the story can be ultimately read as suggesting, somewhat dishearteningly, that workers can only liberate themselves from oppression by becoming Bosses themselves. Also good in February is M. Bennardo’s “Last Day at the Ice Man Café,” which examines the problems someone frozen for centuries in a glacier, like the famous √tzi Iceman, might have adapting to the modern world if he somehow came back to life; entertaining, but since there’s no real explanation of how he could have survived being frozen in the first place, let alone counting on doing it again as he seems to be planning, it can’t really be taken seriously as SF. A similar, although unfortunately more plausible, story is new writer Maggie Shen King’s “Ball and Chain,” a Comedy of Manners about the intricate courtship and relationship customs that arise as adaptations to a severe imbalance in the ratio of women to men (a real problem in the making) in a relatively near-future China.

The rest of the stories in the February issue are somewhat weaker. Jason K. Chapman’s too-long “The Long Happy Death of Oxford Brown” is another story that deals with a Virtual World as a literal Afterlife, somewhere you’re uploaded to when you die, but does less of interest with the theme than Ian R. MacLeod did with a similar theme in “The Discovered Country” in last September’s issue. New writer Sarah Pinsker gives us an intriguing glimpse of “The Transdimensional Horsemaster Rabbis of Mpaumalanca Province” without doing much to answer the questions that immediately arise as to how and why they got to be what they are. Marissa Lingen’s “Ask Citizen Etiquette” is a rather slight joke story about an Ann Lander’s-type advice column for robot owners of the future. And new writer Maurice Broaddus’s “Steppin’ Razor” is a flamboyant but somewhat murky story about strife in a Steampunkish Alternate World Jamaica.

In the interests of full-disclosure, I should probably say that I’m the Reprints Editor for Clarkesworld, but since I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with selecting the original fiction that appears in each issue, I’m hoping that it won’t be too much of a Conflict-of-Interest to review it, but you can take what I have to say with a grain of salt if you’re suspicious. The best story in the January Clarkesworld is probably “Wine,” by Yoon Ha Lee, a grim, flamboyantly over-the-top Space Opera that teeters on the razor edge between fantasy and science fiction throughout, and contains images that may be too strong for some of the more-squeamish readers; powerful stuff. Ken Liu’s “The Clockwork Soldier” is a Scheherazade-like tale of a prisoner inveigling his Bounty Hunter captor during a long, boring spaceflight into playing a Text Adventure game about the prisoner’s former life and ostensible crime, and the decision she ultimately makes as a result; the truth about his origin that’s hinted at in the game will hardly come as a surprise to the experienced genre reader, but it all makes for a pleasant reading experience. “Grave of the Fireflies,” by Cheng Jingbo, translated by Ken Liu, is a Fairy Tale recast as a Cosmic Space Opera, wildly imaginative although it occasionally verges on incoherence.

The strongest story in the February Clarkesworld is probably An Owomoyela’s “And Wash Out the Tides of War,” about an estranged daughter working out her difficult relationship with her mother, who has been changed into a cyborg war machine by enigmatic alien technology, adding an additional level of difficulty and interest to the usual prickly mother-daughter relationships you often run into in fiction (and in life). Cat Rambo’s “Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable” expertly tells a rather familiar story about a spouse trying to recreate their dead mate through cloning and being disappointed by the result, but carries it through to an unusual note of reconciliation and acceptance. In fact, both of these stories turn out to be ultimately more hopeful than the usual run of hopeless, nihilistic stuff these days. New writer Natalia Theodoridou’s “The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul” seems a bit bleaker on the surface, a spacefarer shipwrecked on a hostile alien planet with no hope of rescue and his eventual death almost insured, but manages to make a statement anyway about the indomitability of the human spirit as the castaway continues to make mobile mechanical creatures to keep him company; this all may be more effective if you’ve seen the video of the eerily beautiful wind-propelled assemblages stalking a Danish beach that was on YouTube last year, which I strongly suspect was the inspiration for this story.

The January Lightspeed contains two stories that feature aliens who offer humankind, for their own different motives and in their own different ways, access to technology that may take us to the stars. The more successful of the two is Anaea Lay’s “Salamander Patterns,” which offers at its core a strong emotional story about two crippled creatures finding and helping each other, and learning how to live with the losses they both have suffered. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape” has a more complex storyline but generates less emotional involvement, and is also a bit murky in places. Matthew Hughes’s “His Elbow, Unkissed: A Kalso Chronicles Tale” continues, as the title indicates, the adventures of former private operative Erm Kaslo in a universe where magic is slowly taking over from science, and where the stories themselves are shifting from SF to fantasy; this is vivid, entertaining stuff, but if you don’t know the elaborate backstory, which mostly appeared in another magazine, this story, which also doesn’t end, but just stops in the middle of the plot, comes across as a chunk of a de facto serialization, rather than a story that stands independently on its own feet. Adam-Troy Castro offers us a too-long surreal comic piece about a future where women give birth to babies who have the shapes of squares, cylinders, or rhombuses in “The Thing About Shapes To Come.”

There are several strong stories in the February Lightspeed, the strongest of which may be new writer Jessica Barber’s “Coma Kings,” which takes a fairly tired cyberpunk trope, people who become so addicted to gaming in Virtual Reality worlds that they abandon physical reality, and refurbishes it by matching it with a compelling human story and family drama, told by a character with a quirky and interesting voice. Also good in February is “Harry and Marlow and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition,” by Carrie Vaughn, another in her series of tales about the adventures of the rebellious Princess of Wales, Harry, and her swashbuckling pilot companion Marlow in a war-torn Steampunk British Empire that has been transformed by reverse-engineered alien technology; Vaughn manages to avoid the problem suffered by Hughes’s “His Elbow, Unkissed” by providing a satisfactory ending to this particular episode, and providing enough references so that you can pick up setting and circumstances even if you’re not familiar with the backstory from earlier tales in the series, making it seem less obviously a chunk of a novel (although it probably will be in time). In “So Sharp That Blood Must Flow,” new writer Sunny Moraine manages to tell a version of “The Little Mermaid” even grimmer than that originally told by Hans Christian Anderson; although vivid, this is also violently grotesque in places, so be warned. In “None Owns the Air,” Ken Liu tells an intriguing story of a man charged, on pain of death, with learning the secret of flight in an unspecified Chinese-seeming milieu that might be a fantasy world or an Alternate History; think it would have worked better if he had managed to figure it out without recourse to dissecting and studying fantasy birds who don’t exist in our own reality, which would probably seem like cheating a bit to an Analog writer.

The first story posted on Tor.com this year is a poignant counterfactual by Harry Turtledove, “The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging,” posted on January 8. It won’t take experienced genre readers long to figure out who the old woman they visit in the Alternate Reality was in our reality, most will have tumbled to it long before the actual reveal, but the story is melancholy and powerful in spite of that, sadly compelling.

Charlie Jane Anders’s “The Cartography of Sudden Death,” posted on Tor.com on January 22, embroils a downtrodden servant girl from a brutally totalitarian future regime in a war of time-traveling assassins; exciting stuff, although it seems to end just as it’s really getting underway, with most of the questions it raises unanswered, which makes me suspect that a sequel is in the works.

Marie Brennan’s fantasy story from Tor.com for February 5, “Mad Maudlin,” is an entertaining literalization of the old English folk poem “Mad Maudlin’s Search For Her Tom of Bedlam.”