68

Interzone 251.

Asimov’s, March.

Tor.com, January 29.

Tor.com, February 4.

Tor.com, February 12.

Tor.com, February 26.

Space Opera, ed. Rich Horton. (Prime Books, 978-1607014072, $17.45, 576 pages).

 

After a weak start to the year with the January-February issue, the mostly disappointing Interzone 250, Interzone rebounds with a stronger March-April issue, Interzone 251. The strongest story in Interzone 251 is the powerful but bleak “Ashes,” by Karl Bunker, set in an airless (emotionally, not literally) future where the human race is slowly dwindling toward extinction and even machine intelligences or AIs can achieve transcendence only at the cost of vanishing forever from existence. This is quietly but effectively grim, and don’t expect any note of hope or any Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card at the end, because there isn’t any. Also good but also bleak (in fact, in usual Interzone fashion, almost everything here is bleak) is “Fly Away Home,” by Suzanne Palmer, which is, oddly, one of the two stories about the labor struggles of asteroid miners I’ve seen so far this year, the other being Derek Künsken’s “Schools of Clay,” from the February Asimov’s. The characters in the Künsken are mechanical beings, not humans, and the story concerns a sort of robot Lenin trying to raise a revolution of sorts among the other robot workers, but the unfortunate human protagonist of “Fly Away Home” is mainly concerned with personal survival, trying to keep herself from being totally degraded and destroyed by the horrifying misogynist society that has enslaved her, and which regards women as things less than human, good only for being raped and impregnated. There’s no happy ending here either, and the only note of hope is that she keeps fighting against the society that oppresses her, and in the end does her best to take as many of them down with her as possible. New writer Tracie Welser’s “A Doll Is Not a Dumpling” also takes place in another repressive society (or a presumptive one anyway, as we never learn much about the issues or what the other side of the story is), as a group of terrorists press an innocent, childlike dumpling-vendor robot into use as a weapon of assassination; the hapless, bewildered robot is a sympathetic character, but since we never learn much about the political issues at stake, we don’t feel the sympathy for the terrorists I think we’re supposed to, especially as their strike kills dozens of innocent people in addition to the intended target. John Grant’s “Ghost Story” is a melancholy story about a man who inexplicably drifts away from his own timeline and can’t get back to it again. Gareth L. Powell’s also melancholy “This Is How You Die” reads like a synopsis of a disaster novel, taking us through its apocalyptic pandemic scenario in only a few pages rather than six hundred of them, but still ending with the protagonist (and, presumably, just about everybody else) dying miserably; with a resurgence of Ebola killing hundreds in Africa as I write these words, only an airliner flight away, it makes for somewhat uneasy reading. And Greg Kurzawa’s “Old Bones” is a horror story, a zombie story of sorts, that would feel more in place in Interzone’s companion magazine, Black Static.

The March issue of Asimov’s is also somewhat weak—little really awful here, but little that rises much toward the exceptional, either. The best stories here are probably James Patrick Kelly’s “Declaration,” a reprint of a clever story I bought for my audio anthology Rip-Off! last year, in which teenagers get involved in a political movement to gain the right to spend all their time in virtual reality, and “Drink in a Small Town,” by new writer Peter Wood, a time-travel story so understated that it’s almost subliminal. Cat Rambo’s “All the Pretty Little Mermaids” is a sad but predictable story, a bit overlong, of a woman who gets bullied by her ex-husband into breeding bioengineered living mermaids as pets for their daughter; this all goes pretty much where you’d expect it to go, with the author hammering on it a bit too heavily as a metaphor for a number of feminist issues. Genevieve Williams’s “The Redemption of Kip Banjeree” is a fast-paced cyberpunkish tale about a courier using her skills at parkour and computer hacking to deliver an important package across a cityscape, with an adversary attempting to highjack it along the way; mildly reminiscent of a few of William Gibson’s old stories; the speculative element here is minimal, since essentially the same story could be (and has been) told with a bicycle messenger trying to deliver drugs or some other MacGuffin across present-day Manhattan or Los Angeles. New writer Jay O’Connell’s “Solomon’s Little Sister” is a variant of the familiar time-travel story which has alternate versions of the same person hammering on the door. And new writer Sean Monaghan’s “Walking Gear” is a variant of a familiar story about a man struggling with his sister’s drug addiction, with a gimmick about re-growing amputated limbs thrown in to give it a rationalization as science fiction.

The practice of an editor hiring authors to write stories inspired by an illustration, often several different stories inspired by the same illustration, is an old pulp-magazine trick that goes back for decades, into at least the ‘50s, and probably earlier. Now it’s David G. Hartwell’s turn to practice it, with The Anderson Project, three stories commissioned by Hartwell, inspired by a (somewhat murky, actually) painting by Richard Anderson, and all posted on Tor.com.

All three of the Anderson Project stories are well-crafted and worth reading, but, truth to tell, none of them is entirely successful, and I doubt that we’ll be seeing any of them on next year’s award ballots. “Reborn,” by Ken Liu, posted on Tor.com on January 29, has a wonderful idea at its core, aliens “whose brains, like the teeth of sharks, never cease growing. New brain tissue is continuously produced at the core while the outer layers are sloughed off periodically like snakeskin”—producing a race of creatures who forget the past almost as soon as they experience it. It would be fascinating to explore the society that aliens such as this would produce, and the social adaptations that living with this curious physiology would force on them, but there’s little of that here, the bulk of the story taken up by twisting the plotline around to justify the scene in the Richard Anderson painting; all of the Anderson stories, in fact, suffer from this to one degree or another. In the case of the Liu, for all of the twisting and turning, I doubt that the identity of the mysterious traitor is going to come as a surprise to many experienced genre readers. Judith Moffett’s “Space Ballet,” posted on Tor.com on February 4th, is perhaps the Anderson Project story that makes the least attempt to literalize the scene in the Anderson painting, using the scene as something that subjects in a psychological experiment see in a series of precognitive dreams; this allows Moffett to discuss the images from the painting in symbolic terms, rather than having to twist the plot around so that the scene actually happens in the course of the story (although the deciphering of the symbols to warn that a tsunami is imminent seems a bit of a stretch to me). This is a clever way to try to get around having to directly employ the events from the painting, which shows spacesuited figures being waved around by tentacles that dangle from what looks like a Flying Saucer, but also has the effect of turning the story into a succession of Talking Heads explaining things to each other, which makes it all a bit static. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,” posted on Tor.com on February 12, is perhaps the Anderson Project story that is the most successful on its own terms as an individual story; it’s also the story that’s the most hurt by the necessity of rationalizing the images from Anderson’s painting into the plotline, as its story of a troubled woman’s problematical relationship with a hyper-intelligent sentient parrot would actually work much better on its own without the Anderson Project elements shoehorned into it.

Much more successful as an individual short story is Karl Schroeder’s “Jubilee,” posted on Tor.com on February 26. This has at its core another fascinating idea, one that I understand is also at the core of Schroeder’s new novel Lockstep—a social system whereby whole communities go into a synchronized pattern of hibernation and awakening that allows them to wait out the hundreds or even thousands of years it takes for spaceships to travel between the stars (no Faster Than Light travel or wormhole shortcuts in Schroeder’s scenario) without falling hopelessly behind the space travelers, thus making it possible to maintain social continuity even at interstellar distances. “Jubilee” cleverly humanizes this rather abstract concept and gives it immediacy by making it a story of star-crossed love, and using for its protagonists people who aren’t a part of the lockstep system, so it becomes emotionally something like a story about Elf Hill—once your loved one goes in there, you may not see them for decades, you may grow old waiting for them, or you may never see them again...while to the one inside, no time at all will have passed, although their lover may be old and spavined or dead by the time they come out again.

I must admit that I may have been inclined to like Rich Horton’s reprint anthology Space Opera not only because I generally like Space Opera stories, but because I bought and originally published five out of the twenty-two stories here, and have reprinted five others in one or another of my annual Best of the Year anthologies. This naturally inclines me to think that Horton has excellent taste, but I don’t think most readers will disagree—this is a big, meaty book that delivers a lot of good core SF, some of it Space Opera as good as anybody has ever written it, well worth the money. The best story here is probably Ian McDonald’s complex and wonderful novella “The Tear,” but also first-rate are Greg Egan’s “Glory,” Gwyneth Jones’s “Saving Tiamaat,” David Moles’s “Finisterra,” Robert Reed’s “Precious Mental,” Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s “Boojum,” Ian R. MacLeod’s “Isabel of the Fall,” Aliette de Bodard’s “Two Sisters in Exile,” and Naomi Novik’s “Seven Years From Home.” There’s also good work in Space Opera by Yoon Ha Lee, James Patrick Kelly, Gareth L. Powell, Chris Willrich, Michael F.Flynn, Una McCormack, Kage Baker, Paul Berger, Jay Lake, Justina Robson, Alastair Reynolds, Lavie Tidhar, and Benjanun Sriduangkaew.