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Asimov’s, March.

F&SF, March/April.

The Best of Ian McDonald, Ian McDonald. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848638-90-7, 536 pages.) Cover art by Jim Burns.

 

After a weak February issue, Asimov’s produces a stronger March issue—there’s nothing exceptional here, but it does contain some good solid work. Best story in the issue is also the longest, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s novella “Inhuman Garbage.” This is a nicely done murder mystery/police procedural set on the Moon, when a dead body shows up in the recycling system of a domed Lunar city. Rusch here shows the chops she developed wearing her other hat of mystery writer, and expertly handles the investigation, told from several different points of view, into the body dump, an investigation which reveals a pattern of similar corpses disposed of in the same way in the past, and eventually suggests a sinister conspiracy with wide-reaching political implications. In a nicely modern touch, although who committed the crime and why it was done is discovered by the investigating detective, there’s no proof, and the political conspiracy behind it, although revealed to her eyes, is not brought crashing down by the last page; instead, it would be possible to imagine someone shrugging and saying to the disillusioned detective, “It’s Chinatown—except on the Moon.”

Also good in March is “Pareidolia,” a posthumous collaboration between the late Kage Baker and her sister, Kathleen Bartholomew, who completed the story from notes left behind by Baker after her tragically early death. Baker, of course, was famous for her long sequence of stories about the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company, many of which appeared in Asimov’s during her lifetime, and this is a worthy addition to the Company canon, colorful and entertaining and ingenious, although it really needs to start in Sixth Century Constantinople rather than several pages and many centuries earlier in Ancient Egypt as it does; those pages are mostly a recap of the concept behind the Company, which experienced Baker readers will already know, and which is easy enough to pick up interstitially from context even if you’ve never read anything by her before. Also entertaining in March is “Tuesdays,” by Suzanne Palmer—nothing much actually happens here except that the customers in an all-night diner out on the highway describe to investigating cops the nearby landing of a huge UFO, which had disappeared again by the time the cops show up, but there’s a sprightly, quirky tone here that makes what could have been routine and boring enjoyable, and the eyewitnesses, each of whom gets their own segment of testimony, are an entertainingly varied and interesting bunch.

Gregory Norman Bossert’s “Twelve and Tag” is a variation of the tale-told-in-a-bar story, except that this bar is on Europa, where undersea miners who work the ice-covered deep oceans of Europa are playing a bar game where they have to tell their worst, stupidest, most painful, or kindest personal stories, as part of an effort to integrate two new members into their crew as replacement for those who have died on the job. This is nicely handled, and the stories are intrinsically interesting, although the sorting-out as to which category they belong in seems sometimes a bit arbitrary, and the stakes involved in the game turn out to be higher than they may at first appear. “Holding the Ghosts,” by new writer Gwendolyn Clare Williams, concerns a process where brain-dead bodies are leased to carry the recorded memories—the “ghosts”—of deceased relatives, so that for the duration of the lease the host body believes itself to be the dead loved one, and interacts with the family as if it actually is that person. No memories are supposed to be carried over from one lease to another, but here they linger instead, gradually building up something like an integrated Multiple Personality, a new personality made up of combinations of traces of the others that that host as carried. Intriguing, although I’m not sure that the whole rental thing really makes much sense if you squint at it hard enough. Veteran writer Kit Reed closes out the issue with “Military Secrets,” a creepy Twilight Zoneish story about kids who have lost their fathers in war endlessly riding a bus to some unknown destination they never get to, probably in the Afterlife.

The March/April issue of F&SF is the first official issue to appear under the editorship new editor C.C. Finlay, who replaced long-time editor Gordon Van Gelder (who remains as the magazine’s publisher) at the beginning of the year. Like the issue guest-edited by Finlay back in 2014 (widely—and correctly, as it turns out—regarded at the time by genre insiders as a trial run preparatory to Van Gelder turning the editorial reins over to a new editor), Finlay does a respectable job with this one. Much the same could be said about it, in fact, as I said about the March Asimov’s above—there’s nothing exceptional here, but the issue does contain a lot of good solid work, although unlike Asimov’s, where almost everything was science fiction of one degree or another of rigor and plausibility (with the exception of the Kit Read story), here you get a mixed bag of SF, fantasy, horror, and what I suppose could be called “slipstream,” which Finlay seems to lean toward a bit more than Van Gelder did.

The best story here is Paul M. Berger’s “The Mantis Tattoo,” about a prehistoric tribe coming into conflict with another tribe that is attempting to move into their territory, and a young man who is reluctantly pressed into service as an emissary of the trickster god of his tribe and delegated to make contact with the encroaching enemy. From internal clues, I’d guess that this is supposed to be set 50,000 or 60,000 years ago, perhaps during an interglacial period, at a time when several subspecies of hominids still existed in close proximity, and I’d guess that the protagonist’s tribe are supposed to be the ancestors of the Bushmen, considering their smaller physical stature compared to the enemy tribe and their dependency on poisoned arrows as their ultimate defense. The story is suspenseful and entertaining enough to take a worthy place in the long roster of “prehistoric” stories, and may or may not contain a fantasy element, depending on how literally you take the visions of the Mantis god who appears to the protagonist throughout. From the distant past, new writer Brian Dolton takes us about as far into the future as it’s possible to get, to the very end of the universe, in fact, in “This Is The Way the Universe Ends: With a Bang,” which shows us that even creatures so far evolved from humanity that they might as well be gods still engage in deadly squabbles over territory.

Also good here is Charlotte Ashley’s “Dumas-inspired” (the author is an enthusiast for the works of Alexandre Dumas) fantasy “La Hêron,” set in a 7th Century France where a doughty swordswoman must compete in a dueling contest against a powerful fairy lord. Jay O’Connell takes us to an unlikely near future in “Things Worth Knowing,” about a school security guard who struggles to protect one of his students who’s caught up in a potentially lethal competition for his services by rival corporations; the world-weary security guard, doggedly determined to do his duty even in the face of overwhelming odds, is a likeable and admirable character, but I find the social set-up here to be not particularly plausible (especially as there seems no particular reason why the corporations couldn’t clandestinely snatch the kid from his home or on his way to school rather than fighting it out in a public place where there is a security guard to oppose them). Alice Sola Kim tells a straight horror story about a sinister boarding school in “A Residence for Friendless Ladies,” Sadie Bruce balances between slipstream and horror in the somewhat distasteful “Little Girls in Bone Museums,” Kat Howard spins a fantasy about lovers literally stealing time from each other, in “A User’s Guide to Increments of Time,” Jonathan L. Howard delivers a time-paradox farce in “A Small Diversion on the Road to Hell,” and Henry Lien tells an epistemological story in the form of Twitter tweets, in “Bilingual.”

The lead story here, and by far the longest, is a novella by Chinese writer Bao Shu, translated into English by Ken Liu, “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear.” This is an ambitious but, unfortunately, not entirely successful story, not quite an Alternate History story although it features elements of that form, about a man struggling through life in a China where history seems to be running backwards (although people are still living forward in the ordinary way), so that society abandons computer technology and starts making cathode ray tubes instead, and so on. I could have done without this element, which was hard to take seriously in an otherwise realistic mimetic story, and it might have worked better as a straight mainstream story about a man living through upheavals in Chinese society during the course of a long life. The protagonist is (deliberately, I’m sure) something of an Everyman, whose life was not really in any major way exceptional, duplicating the experiences of thousands of others, and although the details of some of his life’s experiences are fascinating, others are, frankly—a bit dull.

It’s early days yet, only a few months into 2015 as I write these words, but already there’s a strong contender for the title of Best Collection of the Year—The Best of Ian McDonald, a selection of some of Ian McDonald’s best work from 1988 to 2013. McDonald is not exactly an obscure name in the field, probably most core SF readers will recognize him, and he did win a Hugo Award in 2007 for “The Djinn’s Wife” (included here), but I’ve always felt that he doesn’t really get the level of recognition that he deserves, either. For my money, Ian McDonald is one of the best SF writers currently working in the field, perhaps one of the three or four top writers, and although he has written critically acclaimed novels, he does much of his best work at shorter lengths—so you have a treat in store for you with this hefty collection, and perhaps a revelation if you haven’t encountered McDonald’s work before. McDonald’s range is wide and varied, and well represented here, from his “Future India” stories to New Space Opera, from stories of an alien invasion of Africa to stories of the sexual interactions of Terrans with their alien conquerors, from sly superhero stories to Retro SF to YA stories set on a terraformed Mars, from high-tech future sports stories to tales of dangerous encounters with the creatures of Faerie. Nothing is weak here, but the best stories include the aforementioned “The Djinn’s Wife,” “Verthandi’s Ring,” “After Kerry,” “[A Ghost Samba],” “Toward Kilimanjaro,” “Winning,” “Digging,” and “The Queen of Night’s Aria.” McDonald has done some of his best work at novella length, and it’s too bad that practical length restrictions didn’t allow the inclusion of stories such as “The Little Goddess” or “The Days of Solomon Gursky,” but at least two of his best novellas are here, “Tendeleo’s Story” and “The Tear.” In my opinion, “The Tear” was the best SF novella of 2008, and probably worth the price of admission all by itself.