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F&SF, January/February.

Asimov’s, January.

Grand Crusades: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Five, ed. Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-710-3, $45.00, 472 pages.) Cover art by Tom Kidd.

 

F&SF starts 2015 with a January/February issue featuring several good stories and a bunch of weaker ones; once again, the best stories are all fantasy, there’s little science fiction here, and most of what there is is minor. The best story here is Eleanor Arnason’s lyrical and quirky fantasy, “Telling Stories to the Sky,” about a girl who wants to be a storyteller but can’t be, because of the repressive society in which she lives—vaguely reminiscent of an Arabian Nights setting, a city “long since gone and forgotten”—and the inventive and ultimately life-changing ways she comes up with to get around those roadblocks and become a storyteller after all, including becoming court storyteller to the North Wind himself. Matthew Hughes offers us another highly entertaining adventure of Raffalon the Thief, “Prisoner of Pandarius.” The major influence on Hughes was clearly Jack Vance, and these Raffalon tales are about as close as you’re going to get these days, now that Vance is gone, to one of Vance’s stories about the misadventures of Cugel the Clever, although, unlike Cugel, who was nowhere near as clever as he believed himself to be, Raffalon actually is clever and highly competent as a thief—but is consistently dogged by terrible luck, which continues to hamper him here as he struggles to pull off a complicated and dangerous heist.

Bud Webster offers us an unusual Cajun-flavored fantasy, a background not used much in modern fantasy, in his novella “Farewell Blues,” set in 1930’s Louisiana, featuring an itinerant Jazz musician and his possibly magical trumpet who have a tendency to blunder into supernatural situations, including, here, a confrontation with Elder Gods (or at least Forces) where the dead coming back from the dead is a good thing, because they’re on your side. The story, which I assume is the beginning of a series, is vaguely reminiscent of Manly Wade Wellman’s stories about wandering balladeer Silver John, but with enough unique flavor of its own to make it engaging. “Portrait of a Witch” is one of Albert E. Cowdrey’s more satisfying stories of late. Like his “Out of the Deeps,” in the January/February 2014 F&SF, this is more autumnal, more solemn and less comic, than the typical Cowdrey story, and, like that earlier story, it could easily have been told as a straight mystery story and sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s or Ellery Queen’s magazine with the rather perfunctory supernatural element excised—it wouldn’t have been that difficult to rewrite this as about a clever female serial killer rather than a clever female serial killer who uses supernatural means to kill. The story manages to generate a good deal of suspense, and the villain is compellingly nasty.

There’s also an installment of Naomi Kritzer’s de facto novel serialization here, “Jubilee: A Seastead Story,” but the backstory has become complicated enough that you’re unlikely to fully appreciate this if you haven’t already read the earlier stories—and if you haven’t, you might be better off waiting for the inevitable novel version instead. Most of the rest of the stories in January/February are minor. Nik Houser tells a jokey time-travel paradox story that goes on for much too long in “History’s Best Places to Kiss,” Francis Marion Soty retells an Arabian Knights story with considerably less imagination than Eleanor Arnason did in “The Gazelle Who Begged for Her Life,” Eric Schwitzgebel tells a Shaggy God story in “Out of the Jar,” and Alan Baxter offers a Pirates-Have-a-Lovecraftian-Encounter story, not the first to appear in the magazine this year, “The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner,” which reads as if the author sat down at the keyboard after an all-night Pirates of the Caribbean marathon. The best of the stories covered in this paragraph (excepting the Kritzer, which is well-crafted, but too obviously a fragment of a longer work), is Gregor Hartmann’s “The Man from X,” a minor but pleasant SF story with, for once, a somewhat optimistic message.

Just as I was sitting down to write his column, it was announced that writer Charles Coleman Finlay will (as many genre insiders speculated that he’d be) be taking over as the active acquisitions editor of F&SF, although former editor Gordon Van Gelder will remain as publisher and owner. Best of luck to him—and, being who I am, it’s my hope that he gets some more strong core science fiction into the magazine, something that’s been lacking there for a couple of years now.

Much like F&SF, Asimov’s starts its year with a January issue that features a couple of strong stories and a raft of more minor ones, the main difference being that all of the stories in the January Asimov’s are science fiction (to one degree or another of rigor and plausibility), not fantasy—probably just as well, as F&SF is usually better at fantasy than Asimov’s usually is anyway.

The best story in the January issue is probably Allen M. Steele’s novella “The Long Wait,” a semi-sequel to earlier stories “The Legion of Tomorrow,” in the July 2014 issue, and “The Prodigal Son,” in the October/November 2014 issue, all of which details the construction and launch of the first (unmanned) starship, starting with the formation of a group of like-minded futurists and SF fans in the ‘30 who lay the groundwork for a foundation that eventually funds the problem-plagued launch of the starship itself, which takes place in “The Prodigal Son.” This story deals with the aftermath of the events in the previous story, as the anxious scientists wait, for decades, to see if the starship is going to reach its destination and be able to send messages back to their monitoring station on Earth. Some readers may feel that this story is aptly named “The Long Wait,” since not much of a SFnal nature happens throughout most of its length, but Steele fills in the waiting time in a satisfactory fashion with a compelling and complicated family drama involving the people who are waiting for a message to return from the stars to prove that the technology worked after all, and there is an SFnal payoff at the end. Also good in January is “The Unveiling,” by Christopher Rowe. This is something by Rowe unlike the stuff I’ve seen from him before, which usually features a posthuman future strange enough to be just this side of surrealism; “The Unveiling,” though, is an old-fashioned colony planet story, set on a colony world with a highly repressive government, where one man’s self-sacrificing actions serve as the unlikely basis for an eventual revolution; an absorbing read, which makes you care about its protagonist in a short amount of time.

Everything else here is more minor, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t entertaining. Best of the remaining stories is probably Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Ninety-Five Percent Safe,” about one dissatisfied young girl taking an impulsive action that changes her life and the lives of the rest of her family forever. The action that she takes is so self-centered, short-sighted, and stupid, and so obviously not a good idea, that it’s annoying and makes you want to yell at her—but hey, young people in real life do make impulsive decisions that are self-centered, short-sighted, and stupid, and which irrevocably change the rest of their lives, so I suppose they should be allowed to make them in fiction as well. Jay O’Connell tells a twisted and faintly distasteful story of desire, obsession, and perversion in “Candy From Strangers.” Rudy Rucker’s collaboration with Marc Laidlaw, “Watergirl,” is full of gonzo pyrotechnics, and reads much like all of Rucker’s collaborations have, regardless of who he’s collaborating with. Peter Wood blithely ignores the limitations of the cube-squared law in “Butterflies,” a tale about illegal genetic manipulation producing huge insects in the backwoods of North Carolina with the help of a handy-dandy nuclear reactor kept in a toolshed. Sarah Pinsker’s “Songs in the Key of You” is basically a YA High School story about an artistic nerd attempting to deal with the Mean Girls who torment her, with a very minimal fantastic element added.

Grand Crusades, The Early Jack Vance, Volume Five, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan, is a collection of five of Jack Vance’s early “novels,” most of which would be considered to be novellas by the word-counting protocols in use today, “The Rapparee,” “Crusade to Maxus,” “Gold and Iron,” “The Houses of Iszm,” and “Space Opera.” This is old-fashioned pulp adventure stuff, turned out originally in the ‘50s and early ‘60s for unabashed pulp markets such as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, with only hints here and there of the sophistication of his later work, and there’s little doubt that some modern readers may have trouble getting beyond what they will react to as the racism, sexism, and colonialism common to pulp adventure of the day—if you can make allowances for the period in which they were written, though, these are a lot of fun. And Vance was never a stock pulp writer, even in his early days. In “The Rapparee,” published as a book as The Five Gold Bands, the protagonist Paddy is a comic stage Irishman of a sort that might be considered offensive today, but he’s also shrewd, resourceful, and honorable in his own way, and while his romantic relationship with stowaway Fay will certainly raise sexism flags, Fay is clearly far more intelligent than Paddy, and effortlessly manipulates and controls him throughout, and in a sense is the actor whose actions drive the plot in a far more significant way than the protagonist’s do. There’s little other conventional racism here, unless you consider Vance’s attitude toward aliens and the human-descended races who have diverged radically from norm due to different planetary environments to be racism. (Colonialism is more difficult to deny, since colonialism is one of the fundamental assumptions of the pulp writing of the day—but even here, it should be noted that it’s the aliens who are often in control, and the Earthmen who are underdogs.) The best story here is probably “The Houses of Iszm,” which gets into some of the sophisticated conceptualization and evocative world-building that Vance’s later work is noted for. The weakest story is probably “Space Opera,” perhaps written just to work in the title pun, about a touring opera company from Earth playing to unappreciative alien audiences across the Galaxy, some of whom turn out to prefer Jug Band Music.

If you can get in a mood to allow yourself to rollick, these are rollicking good fun, and all of them are at least a touch above the standard work you can pull out of moldering stacks of the pulp magazines of the day.