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Asimov’s, December.

F&SF, November/December.

Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ian Whates. (Solaris Books, 978-1-78108-209-6, $7.99, 448 pages.) Cover art by Pye Parr.

Paradox, Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox, ed. Ian Whates. (NewCon Press, 978-1-907069-72-7, $22.99, 231 pages.) Cover art by Sarah Anne Langton. Back cover art by Storm Constantine.

 

Asimov’s brings its year to a close with a rather weak December issue. The best story here is probably Tim Sullivan’s novella “Anomaly Station,” which manages to generate considerable psychological tension in a tale of mismatched crewmates who begin feuding with each other while crewing a power-relay space station that (perilously) orbits the Anomaly of the title, drawing power from it. I have my doubts about the feasibility of this system, where power is somehow beamed hundreds of light-years away to the energy-hungry civilized planets that receive it, but I’m willing to give him that as his One Impossible Thing (every SF writer is allowed one, per story). What damages the story more, though, to my mind, is one, the fact that there are only two crewmen aboard, and two, that for one of those crewmen, the Authorities would choose to send a sullen, uneducated, street thug and convicted felon out to run the crucial satellite upon which the continued functioning of their entire civilization and their economy depends. Compared to that, beaming power across the interstellar gulfs is easy to swallow. Also good is Robert Reed’s “The Cryptic Age,” another in his long-running Great Ship series; this one is neither the weakest of the series or anywhere near the best, falling somewhere in the middle, but for those who have been following the sequence for years, it does shed some interesting light on the origins of one of the main characters, the ninety-thousand-year-old Miocene, and of the Great Ship itself. It will come as no surprise to any experienced genre reader that Christopher East’s “Videoville” is an intervention-by-time-travel story, but although the tropes are familiar, he handles them expertly, and the characters are likeable.

The November/December F&SF brings that magazine’s year to an even weaker close. The idea behind this issue seems to have been to deliberately publish “transgressive” stories, stories meant to shock that “deal with touchy themes or go beyond the bounds of Political Correctness.” I have nothing against transgressive stories—look at Dangerous Visions—and personally think that much of the best art should make you uncomfortable rather than comfortable, safe, and warm, but the key to getting away with deliberately transgressive stories is that the stories themselves have to be of high quality, putting the transgressive or shocking element to one side...and most of the stories here are rather weak. The best story here is Tim Sullivan’s mildly sacrilegious but good-humored “Yeshua’s Dog” (how sacrilegious you find it will depend on how religious you are, I suppose, but anyone who sat through Life of Brian without storming angrily out of the theater can certainly get through this one without reaching for the lynching rope, and derive a fair amount of amusement from it). Also entertaining here is Justin Barbeau’s “Nanabojou at the World’s Fair,” the story of Coyote inadvertently getting a job portraying a Wild Indian with Apache Bill’s Wild West Show at the World’s Fair of 1904; the story is full of bitter humor, all the more cutting for being dry.

Solaris Rising 3, The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ian Whates, is certainly one of the best SF original anthologies of the year, although I’d rank it somewhat behind Jonathan Strahan’s Reach for Infinity and Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer’s Hieroglyph. I don’t think there’s anything here exceptional enough that it’s likely to reach next year’s award ballots, but the anthology is packed with good solid core-SF stories, little that’s really bad, and at 448 pages for only $7.99, one of the year’s best reading bargains for those interested in original SF anthologies. The best stories here are probably Aliette de Bodard’s “The Frost on Jade Buds,” 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 featuring one sister trying to dissuade another sister from committing a horrifying act of revenge, and Gareth L. Powell’s vigorous and violent Red Lights, and Rain, which features a bloody battle being fought throughout present-day Amsterdam by time-travelling super-powered genetically enhanced agents, each almost impossible to kill; this is gritty and action-packed. Also good are Chris Beckett’s mournful take on genocide, “The Goblin Hunter,” and Alex Dally MacFarlane’s snapshot glimpses of the rousing Chinese space propaganda of the future, provided in “Popular Images from the First Manned Mission to Enceladus.” There’s also strong work here by Adam Roberts, Ken Liu, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Ian R. MacLeod and Martin Sketchley, Nina Allan, Rachel Swirsky, and others.

Ian Whates’s other original SF anthology this year, Paradox, Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox, is less successful than Solaris Rising 3 overall. The Fermi Paradox is one of the central—and most controversial—mysteries of modern science. Simply stated: Where is everybody? If the galaxy is swarming with alien civilizations, how come we don’t see any evidence of them, how come they haven’t visited us? Is there anybody out there at all, or are we completely alone in the universe? Science fiction writers have provided many ingenious explanations for Fermi’s Paradox—this year, for instance, Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Incoming” in the anthology Coming Soon Enough, or Adam Roberts’s “Thing and Sick” from Whates’s own Solaris Rising 3—but you’ll find few of those explanations in Paradox. David L. Clements takes the anthology’s best shot at providing an ingenious explanation in “Catching Rays,” but most of the other stories ignore solving the Paradox altogether, starting instead with the aliens arriving at the beginning of the story or already in hiding among us—all of which is somewhat disappointing, since none of that really provides much explanation of why we don’t see any trace of them now. The failure of the anthology to really get to grips with its own theme is frustrating, but, theme aside, there are good solid SF stories here by Pat Cadigan, Paul Cornell, Tricia Sullivan, Robert Reed, Keith Brooke and Eric Brown, Mercurio D. Rivera, and others, although most of them could have appeared in any market and didn’t need to be preserved for a specialized Fermi Paradox anthology.