69

Asimov’s, April/May.

Asimov’s, June.

F&SF, May/June.

Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons, Tom Purdom. (Fantastic Books, 978-1-61720-943-7, $15.99, 355 pages.)

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2, ed. Gordon Van Gelder. (Tachyon, 9781616921633, $15.95, 432 pages.)

 

The April/May and June issues of Asimov’s are uneven, although both have some good stuff, even if probably not anything you’re going to see on next year’s award ballots. The two strongest stories in April/May, one SF and one fantasy, are James Patrick Kelly’s “Someday” and Michael Swanwick’s “Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown.” Kelly’s “Someday,” the SF story, is to me strongly reminiscent in tone and mood of something by Ursula K. Le Guin, no small compliment in my book, examining the peculiar courtship customs and divergent biology that have developed on a Lost Colony that has drifted out of touch with the rest of humanity—with a final clever twist waiting at the end. The fantasy stories in Asimov’s are usually weaker than the SF stories, but Swanwick’s “Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown,” the fantasy story, is one of the good ones, taking us to a deeply cynical and scathingly satiric version of Hell for a variant of the classic Orpheus story, as a young girl struggles to resist the Devil’s sly lures and rescue her father; it even has, for Swanwick, a relatively upbeat ending. Matthew Johnson’s “Rules of Engagement” and Will McIntosh’s “Scout,” two interesting variations on the standard Military SF story, are also good here, as is K.J. Zimring’s “The Talking Cure,” a clever take on the memory-viewing theme where memories of the past turn out to not be quite what the subject thought they were going to be going in to the process.

The rest of the stories in May/June are weaker, although most are still worth reading. Robert Reed turns in a rare disappointment with “The Principles,” a chunk of a novel where the major interest is in trying to discern (not entirely successfully, I think, in my case) how the world of the story differs from our own timeline, but the story is rather static, mostly Talking Heads talking to each other, with not much of significance actually happening. William Preston’s “Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key” is another in his series about the Old Man, a thinly disguised version of old-time pulp hero Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, and is well-enough crafted, but I’m getting a little tired of them. M. Bennardo’s “Slowly Upward, the Coelancanth” features an ingenious but highly unlikely method of surviving a worldwide Apocalypse. Joe M. McDermott’s “Delores, Big and Strong” is a rather dispiriting story of how bitterly hard farm life can be, thinly rationalized as SF by a medical device that I don’t think could work the way that the story says that it does.

The most entertaining story in the June Asimov’s is probably Lavie Tidhar’s “Murder in the Cathedral,” a flamboyant Steampunk melodrama related to the author’s “Bookman” series. Also good here, and ultimately rather optimistic and life-affirming in spite of its drastic circumstances, is Kara Dalkey’s “The Philosopher Duck,” which features a novel method of surviving through a deadly typhoon that might actually work; in the end, the family not only survives disaster, but, undaunted, immediately start rebuilding their lives, a lesson all of us might usefully learn in a climate-challenged world. Suzanne Palmer’s “Shatterdown” contains most of the tropes that prospectors-diving-into-Gas Giant stories usually have, but handles them well in service of a tale of vengeance and obsession; this is the second story by Palmer I’ve read recently in which the protagonist destroys her enemies by destroying herself, so we may be seeing something of a theme developing here. James Van Pelt’s “The Turkey Raptor” is a delicious little tale of the revenge of a bullied high-school kid, although I didn’t like the injection of a second fantastic element late in the story; one prehistoric survival in a small mountain town I can swallow, but two stretches credulity. Nancy Kress’s “Sidewalk at 12:00 P.M.” features an oddly specialized and personal use for a time-viewer, and one that the protagonist knows going in is useless—although Kress adroitly dodges a definitive answer to whether it’s had the desired effect or not, leaving the door open for a smidgen of hope that it has.

A weak May/June issue of F&SF. The most briskly entertaining story here is Naomi Kritzer’s “Containment Zone: A Seastead Story,” but as has become clearer with each installment (and is probably admitted to by the new subtitle, which the others didn’t carry), this is really a de facto novel serialization, and this chunk doesn’t stand particularly well on its own feet without reference to the earlier stories, and if you haven’t read the earlier stories, you won’t get the full measure of enjoinment out of this one—which is too bad, as it’s nicely done near-future stuff, with an engaging spunky and resourceful protagonist somewhat reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s Podkayne. The most substantial story here is probably Pavel Amnuel’s “White Curtain,” a story which first appeared in Russian in Kiev in 2007, translated by Anatoly Belilovsky, and appearing here for the first time in English; this plays in an intelligent, elegant way with the existence of myriad Alternate Possibility worlds, and a man who can select between them—at a cost.

Everything else in May/June is weaker. David D. Levine crosses the hard-boiled PI story with a retro-SF story set on a habitable Venus in “The End of the Silk Road”; it’s competently handled, but the problem with it is that the mystery part follows the classic hard-boiled PI story formula in too slavish a point-for-point manner, and the SF part is unimaginative, with a not-terribly-evocative Venus that is pretty much just like Earth, except that they call it “Venus,” something substituting amphibian frogmen for the traditional gunsels doesn’t really help all that much. Tim Sullivan’s “The Memory Cage” is about a man who goes to unlikely technological extremes to have a series of conversations with what amounts to his estranged father’s ghost; would probably have worked better as a fantasy, with the ghost an actual ghost rather than an unconvincing “quantum-entangled signal” that is somehow able to talk and respond to the protagonist in real-time. Katie Boyer’s dystopian drama “Bartleby the Scavenger” is set in a little mountain town that has survived as an autonomous unit after a period of social upheaval has torn the rest of the U.S. apart; it’s well-enough crafted, but I found the whole setup unrealistic, especially that people would stay in town and die when the dictatorial Mayor decides that their time is up, rather than lighting out for someplace else; after all, they’re not the only people left alive in the country, you know there are others elsewhere, probably other communities, and you’d think that heading out to possibly find a place in one of them would be a chance worth taking. The rest of the stories include a somewhat distasteful mermaid story, a Lovecraftian pastiche, a broad and overlong farce, and another in a long-running fantasy series that I’ve never been able to warm to.

Tom Purdom made his first professional sale all the way back in 1957. It’s hard to think of any other member of his generation whose current work is frequently mentioned in the same breath with that of writers such as Charles Stross, Greg Egan, and Alastair Reynolds, many of whom were not even born when Purdom started his professional career, but Purdom’s is. In fact, for sweep and audacity of imagination and a wealth of new ideas and dazzling conceptualization, Tom Purdom not only holds his own with the New Young Turks of the ‘90s and the Oughts, he sometimes surpasses them, especially in stories such as “Fossil Games,” “Canary Land,” and “A Response from EST17,” all featured in what is, amazingly enough after all these decades, his very first short-story collection, Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons. Purdom also specializes in writing his own unique brand of Military SF, in stories such as “Legacies,” “Sheltering,” and “Research Project,” stories much more concerned with tactics and strategy than with the bloody details of combat, with hard moral and ethical choices, and, almost uniquely (although not at all surprisingly, considering that Purdom himself was an Army brat) with the psychological effects and consequences that military service has on families. Just to add some variety, the collection also features a rare fantasy by Purdom, although one still concerned with military tactics, “Dragon Drill,” which introduces living dragons as a complicating tactical feature to the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars, and a compelling time-travel story, “The Mists of Time,” which is also concerned with military matters, the British Navy’s campaign against slave ships, and with hard ethical and moral choices; there are rarely any easy or facile choices in Purdom’s work, and everything has consequences. This is a collection that should appeal to anyone who likes core science fiction, and it’s a sad comment on the dwindling of the mid-list that this is appearing from an ultra-small press rather than as a mass-market paperback from Del Ray or Ace or Tor, as it probably would have forty years ago. You won’t find this in bookstores, so if you want it, order it from the publisher at www.fantasticbooks.biz; it’s also available on Amazon.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, usually referred to as F&SF, is the second-longest continually operating genre magazine in the world (Astounding/Analog is the oldest), founded in 1949 and still being published regularly here in 2014. As demonstrated by the stories in The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, twenty-seven stories covering a span from 1952 to 2011, throughout all those decades F&SF has frequently been the most reliable place in the genre to find quality speculative work written to a high literary standard. It’s hard to pick favorites here, as nothing in the anthology is bad and most of the stories are memorable, but if pressed to single my favorites out, I’d mention “The Country of the Kind,” by Damon Knight, “‘—All You Zombies—’”, by Robert A. Heinlein, “A Kind of Artistry,” by Brian W. Aldiss, “Green Magic,” by Jack Vance, “Narrow Valley,” by R.A. Lafferty, “Sundance,” by Robert Silverberg, “Salvador,” by Lucius Shepard, “The Lincoln Train,” by Maureen F. McHugh, “Maneki Neko,” by Bruce Sterling, “Winemaster,” by Robert Reed, and “Have Not Have,” by Geoff Ryman. The anthology also contains good work by Jack Finney, C.M. Kornbluth, Zenna Henderson, Robert Sheckley, Kit Reed, Jane Yolen, Harlan Ellison, George Alec Effinger, James Patrick Kelly, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, M. John Harrison, Paolo Bacigalupi, Elizabeth Hand, Stephen King, and Ken Liu—as many of these stories are classics, this is a good reading bargain for $15.95. You may or may not find this in bookstores; it’s available on Amazon, or from the publisher at http://tachyonpublications.com.