War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, ed. Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak. (Apex Publications, 978-1-937009-26-7, 277 pages.) Cover art by Galen Dara.
The End Is Nigh, ed. by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 978-1495471179, $17.95, 660 pages.) Cover art by Julian Faylona.
Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction, ed. Ben Bova and Eric Choi. (Tor Books, 978-0-7653-3430, 400 pages.)
Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural, ed. Rick Wilber. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-548-3, $15.99, 311 pages.) Cover design by Rain Saukas.
Last Plane to Heaven—The Final Collection, by Jay Lake. (Tor Books, 978-0-7653-778-2, $27.99, 320 pages.)
Black Gods Kiss, by Lavie Tidhar. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848638-01-3, 174 pages.) Cover art by Pedro Marques.
Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories, by Ysabeau S. Wilce. (Small Beer Press, 978-161873089-3, $16.00, 272 pages.)
Questionable Practices, by Eileen Gunn. (Small Beer Press, 978-161873075-6, $16.00, 276 pages.) Cover illustration by Fu Wenchao/Xinhua Press/Corbis.
With a new year looming up only a few days away as I type these words, let’s do a round-up of some of the things I haven’t gotten a chance to mention before. For instance, there were a lot of original SF anthologies this year, many of them from small-press publishers or Kickstarter projects, and I’ve reviewed the major ones—Reach for Infinity, Hieroglyph, Solaris Rising 3, Upgraded, Twelve Tomorrows—but there are a number of anthologies left that, although more minor than the frontrunners overall, still feature some good stories and make for worthwhile reading.
Such is the case with War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak. Most military SF stories have points of similarity, which gives the anthology a certain overall sameness of tone, although the editors have done a good job of varying the tone as much as possible, giving us, in addition to the expected battlefield and combat-in-space stuff, looks at the aftermaths of war and at the cyber battlefields of the future where most of the important action takes place in sealed rooms far away from the actual front lines. Most of the best stories here fall into one or the other of those categories. Rich Larson’s “Ghost Girl” gives us an intriguing look at the troubled aftermath of a war that had featured robot fighting machines, some of which refused to shut down after the war was over, and in “In the Loop,” Ken Liu issues a warning, similar to that delivered by Peter Watts in his “Collateral” from the Upgraded anthology, about the folly of giving our machines the authority to decide for themselves who and when to kill, without human supervision (something Philip K. Dick has been warning us about for decades—but nobody in the military is listening to any of these writers); the cyber battlefield, where drones and robots and even human soldiers are directed and maneuvered from remote-control centers behind the scenes, gets examined in Linda Nagata’s “Light and Shadow” and a few other stories, and cyber hacking attacks of the sort that was recently made against Sony Pictures decide the outcome of the whole war in Keith Brooke’s “War 3.01.” There are also good stories here by James L. Cambias, Yoon Ha Lee, Jake Kerr, Karin Lowachee, and others.
A similar sameness of tone pervades The End Is Nigh, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey—naturally enough, since this is an anthology of stories about impending disaster and apocalypse, and a similarity of tone is a problem that many original themed anthologies share. The literary quality of the stories here is pretty high, but this is grim, bleak stuff, and I would recommend reading it one story at a time rather than going through the whole anthology at one setting; to avoid depression, I would also advise not reading it just after watching the evening news, which clearly shows several of these possible disasters hurtling toward us in the real world. The best stories here are “Shooting the Apocalypse,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, which shows us a near-future world teetering on the brink of an ecological catastrophe that is closer than they think (and probably closer than we think, too), “Removal Order,” by Tananarive Due, a close personal look at the human consequences that must be faced and the hard choices that must be made during a disaster in progress, and “The Gods Will Not Be Chained,” by Ken Liu shows the unexpected and apocalyptic effects that follow that oft-used trope of modern science fiction, uploading a human’s consciousness to a computer. There are also good stories here by Nancy Kress, Tobias S. Buckell, Jack McDevitt, and others. This can be order from Amazon.com, or directly from the editors/publishers at www.johnjosephadams.com.
Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction, an anthology of, what else?, Hard Science Fiction (ostensibly, anyway, although some of it really isn’t all Hard), edited by Ben Bova and Eric Choi, isn’t as successful overall as the two anthologies above, with a number of stories that feel extremely dated and a bit clunky, but there is still good material to be had. Best stories here are “A Slow Unfurling of Truth,” by Aliette de Bodard, another in her long sequence of far-future 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, all of which have been reliably of high-quality, and “Recollection,” by Nancy Fulda, tells the compassionate story of a man struggling to regain his old life after a high-tech treatment for Alzheimer’s. There’s also good stuff by Robert Reed, Jean-Louis Trudel, Gregory Benford, and others.
I doubt that baseball is really “the national pastime” any more, having long since been outstripped in popularity by things like football, basketball, and NASCAR racing. But the SF and fantasy genres seem to have an odd affinity with baseball, and there have probably been more SF and fantasy stories about baseball over the decades than any other kind of sport. Some of them are collected in the reprint anthology, Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural, edited by Rick Wilber. Wilber does a good job here of balancing the kind of baseball stories that he uses; among the best of them we have science fiction baseball stories like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars” and Louise Marley’s “Diamond Girls” (the Robinson is even a fairly hard science fiction baseball story), Alternate History baseball stories such as John Kessel’s “The Franchise,” Bruce McAllister’s “The Southpaw,” and Harry Turtledove’s “The House That George Built,” and supernatural baseball stories such Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s “A Face in the Crowd” and Wilber’s own “Stephen to Cora to Joe.” There’s also good stories here by Karen Joy Fowler, T.C. Boyle, Cecilia Tan, W.P. Kinsella, and others.
The late Jay Lake was a highly talented and highly prolific writer who during his tragically short career seems to have managed to sell to nearly every market in the business, producing enough short fiction to fill four previous collections; and now there’s a fifth, the posthumously released Last Plane to Heaven—The Final Collection. Although he was also a prolific novelist, producing acclaimed novels such as Green and The Madness of Flowers, I always thought that he did his best work at shorter lengths, and this hefty collection, thirty-six stories, gathers some of the best of it, spanning SF, fantasy, and slipstream, all of which he was equally fluid and proficient in, including stories such as “Permanent Fatal Errors,” “West to East,” “The Starship Mechanic” (with Ken Scholes), “Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable,” “The Face of the Moon,” and “Jefferson’s West,” among many others. And these are just a few of Lake’s stories—I can easily think of a dozen other stories not collected here as good as the stories that are. He was truly an impressive talent, and a great loss to all the genres he worked in.
One of the most flamboyantly entertaining collections of the year you’re unlikely to have ever heard of or read, Black Gods Kiss, by Lavie Tidhar. This is a collection of five long tales of “guns & sorcery” (including a previously unpublished novella) featuring the bizarre and often ultraviolent adventures of Gorel of Goliris, a “gunslinger and addict” in a world full of evil sorcery and monstrous creatures, a character who starred in an earlier Tidhar chapbook, Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God. The influence of Stephen King’s “Gunslinger” stories is clear here, although there’s more than a trace of C.L. Moore evident, as well as definite hints of Michael Moorcock and Jack Vance. These stories tend to be rawer and more grotesque, and have a lot more sex in them, than most of what those authors wrote (although C.L. Moore, in stories such as “Shambleau,” could deliver a considerable—and considerably twisted—erotic charge, considering the publishing constraints of the day). What they are is almost the pure essence of pulp—violent, action-packed, paced like a runaway freight train, politically incorrect and socially unredeemable, in your face. They’re also a lot of fun—although they won’t be to the taste of every reader.
A different kind of flamboyance, less raw and violent (although there are occasional surprisingly rich nuggets of murder and mayhem) and more lyrical and whimsical, eccentric, baroquely ornamented, and often very funny, is to be found in Ysabeau S. Wilce’s first collection, Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories. Here you’ll find stories set in Wilce’s strange and strangely appealing fantasy world of the Republic of Califa, something like Gold Rush California might have been if it had been drenched with magick, and, according to a blurb (for once entirely accurate), peopled by “rockstar magicians, murderous gloves, bouncing boy terrors, blue tinted butlers, sentient squids, and a three year old Little Tiny Doom and her vengeful pink plush pig.” Wilce’s plots are intricate and her characters engaging in a ruthless, cold-blooded way, but what really makes these stories shine is the Voice they’re told in—flamboyant, over-the-top verbal pyrotechnics that somehow almost always pay off even when the author is addressing the reader as “my little waffles,” as she does in “Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror.” These are as much fun as Tidhar’s “Guns & Sorcery” stories, although in an entirely different way.
As eccentric in a different way still, quieter, with less violence and verbal pyrotechnics, although still deeply strange, is the work of Eileen Gunn, to be found in her new collection, Questionable Practices. Nobody sees the world quite like Gunn does, who puts her own unique spin on everything, transforming even the mundane into something rich and wonderful, and leading the reader to speculate that her head must be a terrific—although occasionally unsettling—place to live in. All this is on display in the sixteen stories here, including a couple of stories in collaboration with Michael Swanwick, and two stories published in this collection for the first time, “Phantom Pain” and the richly-textured variant on the Golem story, “Chop Wood, Carry Water.” Both the Gunn and the Wilce are available through Amazon, or directly from the publisher at smallbeerpress.com.