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F&SF, May/June.

Interzone 256.

Interzone 257.

The Best of Gregory Benford, Gregory Benford, ed by David G. Hartwell. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-686-1, $40.00, 616 pages.) Cover art by John Harris.

 

The May/June issue of F&SF is overall a somewhat weak one, although there are a few entertaining stories included. The strongest story here is probably “Trapping the Pleistocene,” by James Sarafin. Sarafin popped up in the late ‘90s with a few SF stories, mostly in Asimov’s, and then disappeared; it’s good to see him making a return to writing, or at least to writing SF (I have no idea what he’s been doing in the meantime, and he might have been writing mysteries or non-fiction or romances instead for all I know). “Trapping the Pleistocene” is vigorous and fast-moving, a worthy addition to the long body of stories in which time-travellers go back to prehistoric times to hunt big game, the best-known of which is probably L. Sprague De Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur”—although here they’re trapping the animals rather than hunting them, and they’re after Pleistocene megafauna (in specific, a giant beaver) rather than dinosaurs. The Pleistocene trapping scenes are exciting and authentic-sounding, showing a clear knowledge of both trapping technique and the kind of critters who once inhabited North America, and extrapolating the ways that current-day trapping procedures might have to be adapted on the fly to deal with trapping a beaver the size of a car. What I find really intriguing about the story, though, is that the future scenes are set in a Green Utopia of the sort that many SF writers postulate and would love to see established in reality—and yet, to the protagonist, it’s a nightmare dystopia, one where you can’t even look at the stars without being subjected to an advertisement, one he can’t wait to get out of and back to his deliberately chosen “primitive” style of life...and Sarafin does a good job of making the reader see that Utopia through the protagonist’s eyes and feel how claustrophobic and oppressive it is, so that you can’t wait to get out of it too.

Also good in May/June is Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Laminated Man.” Cowdrey made his reputation writing funny fantasy, often set in New Orleans, but lately he’s been doing better with his grimmer stuff, as here, in what turns out to be a stealth First Contact story with a genuinely nasty and genuinely surprising sting in its tail. Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Four Seasons in the Forest of Your Mind” is another First Contact story of sorts, and again, as in the Cowdrey, it’s a First Contact initiated by aliens in hiding whose motives are sinister and malignant; there are no friendly ETs in this issue of F&SF. Sarah Pinsker offers us the amusing, and blessedly short, “Today’s Smarthouse in Love”; one of the biggest mistakes in writing humor, one demonstrated by a few other stories here, is going on too long.

That, being too long for its weight, is one of the drawbacks of Robert Grossbach’s novella “Entrepreneurs,” especially as the humor is broad and farcical; farces only rarely can afford to go on and on, as Grossbach does here, long after we’ve gotten the joke (and gotten tired of it). It did occur to me while reading “Entrepreneurs” that Grossbach’s protagonist—a hapless, bookish loner, diffident and apologetic, unsuccessful with women and usually too embarrassed to even approach them—is a kind of protagonist, basically a Thurber character, that has appeared over and over again in F&SF stories for decades; in years past, he would have been a librarian or an accountant or a clerk; now he has something to do with computers. David Gerrold’s “Entaglements” eventually gets into some interesting and even poignant autobiographical—or “autobiographical”; this is fiction, after all, and who knows how many of these experiences the author actually shared with his protagonist and how many he made up—details about the alternate lives that a character very like David Gerrold himself might have led if things had turned out differently—but the first fourteen or fifteen pages, dealing with a birthday party that eventually gets the McGuffin into the hands of the protagonist are rambling and discursive, told in an overly arch, overly jocular voice that tries too hard to be amusing, and the lazier readers might not stick with the story long enough to get past this to the good parts. “A Turkey With Egg on His Face” is Rob Chilson’s admitted attempt to write an Avram Davidson story—in particular, a rewrite or at least a reworking of Davidson’s “Full Chicken Richness”—but although Chilson has good intentions and works hard and earnestly at the task, he just doesn’t have the chops to pull this off...as indeed, few, if any, do now that Davidson is gone. Davidson managed to tell the same basic tale with much more wit and panache in less than half the length it takes “A Turkey With Egg on His Face” to attempt it.

The best word to describe most of the stories in Interzone 256, as it often is with Interzone, is “glum.” The exception is T.R. Napper’s “An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extraterrestrial Betting Markets,” which is loose, jazzy, and jaunty in a way that Interzone stories only occasionally are—quite entertaining, although the imaginative premise, aliens who bet on things like which steps a human will step on while going up or down the stairs or how many steps it will take to cross a room, is unlikely at best and hard to take seriously as science fiction. Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s “Nostalgia” is a sensitively told (if, yes, somewhat glum) story of a woman struggling to shake off the deleterious hold of the past in her post-college years and get on with her life rather than losing herself in old memories and regrets, although other than the thin fantastic element of the nostalgia-inducing drug named, (appropriately enough) Nostalgia, the story could have been told as straight mainstream with nothing of importance really changed. Christien Gholson’s “Tribute” goes beyond glum to bleak and hopeless, with few of the vital elements of the plot explained (why can’t the protagonist spin a “journey shell” for herself? How and why did she and her mother get there in the first place? Didn’t her mother tell her anything about any of this, even the most basic answers to the most basic questions? Apparently not, since the protagonist asks herself those basic questions over and over again in the course of the story.). Neil Williamson’s “Fish on Friday” is a broadly satiric piece that, like James Sarafin’s “Trapping the Pleistocene,” reviewed above, paints a Green Utopia as an oppressive, unpleasant place you wouldn’t want to live in. (Does this represent the beginnings of a backlash against the Green Utopias that have been put forth as desirable—even yearned for—futures by many writers in the last few years?) Pandora Hope’s “The Ferry Man” is a goulash of oddly matched horror and fantasy tropes, none of which ever seem to quite gell.

Interzone 257 is a considerably stronger issue. Best story here is probably “A Murmuration,” by Alastair Reynolds. This is ostensibly about a scientist observing and then experimenting with those huge flocks of thousands of starlings who swoop about in intricate, instantly-changing patterns (“murmurations”), but it’s a tricky piece where nothing is really what it initially seems, and what’s really going on is not spelled out, but left as an inference to the reader to be pieced together by the end. Not a typical Reynolds story, but oddly compelling even from the start for a story where the protagonist spends all his time in an isolated camp watching birds and scribbling notes in a notebook. (It’s nice to see Reynolds back in the pages of Interzone, the magazine where he made his start back in the ‘80s, and where he hasn’t appeared much in recent years.) Also good in Interzone 257 is “Brainwhales Are Stoners, Too,” by Rich Larson, a postcyberpunk story which follows a young girl whose desire for a would-be lover allows him to talk her into an ill-conceived incursion into a retooled warehouse now used as a “computation factory”. What they find there is truly horrifying—captive whales forced to use their huge brain capacity as organic computers—and has a profound effect on the girl that will stick with her for the rest of her life, and perhaps even give her life a purpose. “Songbird,” by Fadzlishah Johanabas, has a similar, and similarly horrifying, theme—a captive woman being used by ruthless drug-trafficers as a living drug factory to produce drugs that reproduce in others the emotions that she’s feeling during the process: sadness, determination, rage, lust. The story is emotionally powerful, although I found the abrupt turn-around of her fortunes unconvincing, as was the sudden intrusion of a complicated backstory near the end that probably should have been established much earlier. Aliva Whiteley’s “Blossoms Falling Down” has an interesting backstory—aboard what I assume is an interstellar generation ship, although the story never specifically states this—but doesn’t really do much with it once it’s established. This is a slice-of-life story rather than a strongly plotted one—but considering that haikus are the ruling metaphor of the story, perhaps this is deliberate.

The scientist who also writes SF, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, has been a tradition in the field for generations, although there aren’t too many authors left who fit that definition any more. Geoffrey A. Landis is one. Gregory Benford is another. Gregory Benford, a working scientist, has been one of the most respected practitioners of the Hard Science story for decades now, and The Best of Gregory Benford, edited by David G. Hartwell, is a huge collection of some of Benford’s best short work, from the beginning of his career in 1970 through to 2013, demonstrating the variety of his palate and the sweep and scope of his imagination. Best stories here are probably “In Alien Flesh,” “Redeemer,” “Exposures,” “Of Space/Time and the River,” “Matter’s End,” “Centigrade 233,” “A Desperate Calculus,” “A Dance to Strange Musics,” and “Bow Shock,” but there are thirty other distinguished stories in this hefty collection as well, making this a good reading bargain even at the also-hefty cover price. My only regret is that they didn’t have room for more of Benford’s novellas, a form in which he’s done some of his best work (although the book does include “Matter’s End,” one of my favorite Benford stories), but there’s plenty here to keep you reading for some days to come. If you’re not familiar with Benford’s work—although he’s perhaps better known for his novels, such as the classic Timescape and the Galactic Center books—his collected short work makes a good place to start.