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Subterranean Online, Spring.

F&SF, March/April.

The Time Traveler’s Almanac, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. (Tor, 978-0-7653219, $37.99, 960 pages).

 

The Spring issue of electronic magazine Subterranean Online is another strong one; they’re having a good year so far, in what has, unfortunately, been announced as their last year. The best story in this issue is probably Aliette de Bodard’s “The Days of the War, As Red As Blood, As Dark As Bile,” 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 is a direct sequel to her 2013 novella “On a Red Station, Drifting,” taking place on an embattled and somewhat rundown space station whose inhabitants are faced with the prospect of evacuating in the imminent threat of an advancing alien fleet, and centers around a young girl struggling against but finally being forced to accept a peculiar kind of apotheosis; the scene where refugees are trying to escape the station during an attack are quite harrowing, so be warned. Also excellent in the Spring issue is “The Burial of Sir John Mawe At Cassini,” by Chaz Brenchley, a Retro-SF story about a habitable (and inhabited) Mars that has been colonized by a Victorian-era British Empire in a vaguely Steampunkish Alternate World; I would have liked to see a little more backstory here about just how the Empire ended up on Mars, at least a paragraph or two, but the story itself, following the aftermath of the enigmatic death of a Colonial leader, is strong and bitter and melancholy, and, although it wasn’t written for it, would have fit perfectly into my 2013 anthology with George R.R. Martin, Old Mars.

After two strong SF stories, most of the rest of the stories in the Spring issue are fantasy stories, although there’s still some good material. The best of the fantasy stories is probably Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Bus Stop,” which describes a dangerous encounter in the life of an ordinary-seeming little girl who has been charged by an angel with the mission of traveling across the United States to kill monsters of various kinds; this has the feeling of a sequence in a continuing series to it, although if it is I’m not familiar with the other stories in it, and if it’s not, it perhaps should be, as the little girl is an intriguing and engaging character. Also entertaining is Kat Howard’s “Hath No Fury,” which follows the exploits of a Fury (the kind from Classical Greek Mythology, with the snakes in the hair, although, since she seems only to avenge misdeeds against women by men, she actually reminds me more of the Vengeance Demons from Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which prompts me to ask, as did Buffy: Are there no great misdeeds against men that need to be avenged?) in a magic-haunted modern New York City where the Cosmic Forces are slipping disastrously out-of-balance; the anachronistic bits, like a Hungarian pastry shop being the local hangout for New York City’s wizards, are quite funny, and suggest the kind of thing that Unknown Worlds magazine might have been publishing by now if it had survived to the current day. The issue’s lead story, “The Screams of Dragons,” by Kelley Armstrong, is also entertaining, although much too long, the account of a young boy’s gradual seduction by Evil that might have worked better as a short story and perhaps set in a real place rather than in an imaginary town inhabited by people with mystic abilities, Ian R. Macleod’s “The Traveller and the Book” is also longer than it needs to be, a tail-swallower that turns out to actually be something of an exquisitely well-written Shaggy Dog Joke. Stephen Gallagher’s “One Dove” is neither science fiction nor fantasy, but rather a well-done Victorian mystery about a man becoming inveigled, somewhat reluctantly, into an investigation of a mental patient’s mysterious suicide. All in all, a strong issue, which again makes me regret that Subterranean Online is being shut down, and hope that editor William Schafer changes his mind.

The March/April issue of F&SF is somewhat weak overall. The most accomplished story here may be Rob Chilson’s “Our Vegetable Love,” a fantasy about a little girl with a sentient tree for an uncle; no surprises about where this is going, but it manages to get there and deliver its freight of heart-warmingness in a traditionally satisfying manner. Also good is Oliver Buckram’s “A Struggle Between Rivals Ends Surprisingly,” a slyly comic SF tale about the difficulties involved in communicating between alien races, and a translator who cleverly manipulates the translations to her own advantage. Daniel Marcus’s “Albion Upon the Rock” sets up a familiar SF situation, a slow-traveling generation ship overtaken in transit by waves of later travelers with better technology (here an Entity capable of multi-dimension travel, an ancestor of humanity millions of years removed, rather than the more-typical FTL ship), but the conversation between the Entity and the damaged AI of the ship is amusing, and poignant—although in the end, it all seems not to have made much difference, as the lost ship continues on its way with its cargo of doomed humans while the Entity does its equivalent of shrugging and melts away into the ether. Ted White tells a briskly entertaining time-travel story in “The Uncertain Past,” although it ends up with an unfortunate clichéd situation that doesn’t so much make you gasp in amazement as sigh.

The rest of the stories in the March/April F&SF are all flawed to one extent or another. The protagonist is the issue’s lead story, Pat MacEwen’s “The Lightness of Movement,” is such a fool, stupidly breaking the Prime Directive-like rules in her mission to observe an alien race, and continuing to break them again and again in an acceleratingly stupid way as the story goes on, that by the end I’d completely lost all sympathy for her, and was rather hoping that she’d get her head ripped off. Plus, the basic set-up here, sending humans disguised as aliens down to entice aliens into mating with them so they can observe the mating behavior, is itself stupid, and dangerous; since right now we have the technological capacity to read a car’s license plate from orbit, you’d think that in this high-tech future they’d be able to closely observe all the mating behavior they wanted to observe from up there too. Sarah Pinsker’s “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide” is well crafted, although the peculiar nature of the malfunction of the cyborg arm seems arbitrary and unlikely. In “Collar,” Leo Vladimirsky sets up an absurd situation, economically distressed Americans having to swim three miles out to sea to Chinese ships to find employment, one that I was unable to take seriously. Both Michael Libling’s “Draft 31” and Gordon Eklund’s “I Said I Was Sorry Didn’t I” give us variants on the reality-slowly-disappearing-piece-by-piece story, with no explanation for why it’s happening in either; “Draft 31” is the better read of the two, delivering an eerie frisson, even if it ultimately doesn’t make much sense. Jon DeCles’s “Apprentice” is a rather standard High Fantasy, and D.M. Armstrong’s “Butterscotch” is a somewhat silly zombie (sort of) story in which nothing really is explained. This issue’s Albert E. Cowdrey story, “Byzantine History 101,” a sequel to his similarly weak “The Woman in the Moon,” from the May 2013 issue, is mildly entertaining, but far from Cowdrey at the top of his form, having a typical Cowdreyesque plot about conniving lowlifes trying to outmaneuver each other for personal advantage, and, to one degree or another, getting an ironic comeuppance.

The Time Traveler’s Almanac, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, is an enormous reprint anthology, 960 pages and 65 reprinted stories, that will almost certainly be the standout themed reprint anthology of the year, and that even at $37.99 (the trade paperback may be cheaper) is one of the best reading bargains pound for pound that you’re likely to run into. Time-travel has been one of the mainstay themes of science fiction for more than a hundred years now, and it’s a good indication of just how prevalent this theme has been in the genre, and of just how many time-travel stories there have been, that there are only four stories duplicated between The Time Traveler’s Almanac and the previous big canonical time-travel anthology, Harry Turtledove’s The Best Time Travel Stories of the Twentieth Century, from 2005. Most time travel anthologies tend to concentrate on stories that use physical mechanisms, time machines, to send their characters backward or (more rarely) forward in time, and there are plenty of such stories here, but the VanderMeers widen their scope out to include stories where the time-traveling is accomplished by blundering into a spacetime anomaly or wormhole, by mutant Wild Talent, by drugs, by astral projection or in dreams, or even by magic. They include a few classic stories by Edward Page Mitchell (“The Clock That Went Backwards,” from 1881, which the editors claim is the very first time-travel story), Max Beerbohn, E.F. Benson, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Eric Frank Russell, as well as an excerpt from H.G.Wells’s novel The Time Machine, but the bulk of the stories here are from the late Twentieth Century (mostly the ‘80s and ‘90s) or later, with the most recent being from 2012. With such a huge anthology, it’s impossible to discuss or even mention all the strong stories in the space available to us, but, although almost everything here is worth reading, among the best stories, in my subjective opinion, are “Vintage Season”—still perhaps one of the best time-travel novellas ever—by C.L Moore (usually listed as by Moore alone, although here they have it as by Moore and Henry Kuttner), “Yesterday Was Monday,” by Theodore Sturgeon, “Traveller’s Rest,” by David I. Masson, “Pale Roses,” by Michael Moorcock, “Fire Watch,” by Connie Willis, “Ripples in the Dirac Sea,” by Geoffrey Landis, “Under Siege,” by George R.R. Martin, “Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Noble Mold,” by Kage Baker, “Where or When,” by Steven Utley, “Triceratops Summer,” by Michael Swanwick, “Delphi,” by Vandana Singh, “Lost Continent,” by Greg Egan, and “Palimpsest,” by Charles Stross. The book also includes non-fictional “educational palate-cleansers” by Charles Yu, Stan Love, Genevieve Valentine, and Jason Heller.