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F&SF, July/August.

Asimov’s, August.

The Best of Nancy Kress, Nancy Kress. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-721, $45.00, 560 pages.) Cover art by Tom Canty.

 

The July/August issue of F&SF is a strong one, due largely to the presence of two superior and quirky fantasy stories, “Johnny Rev,” by Rachel Pollack and “The Deepwater Bride,” by new writer Tamsyn Muir. The Pollack is one of a series of stories she’s been writing, starting with “Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls” in the July/August 2012 issue, about Jack Shade, a Traveler, a man who travels between our world and various eerie afterlife/supernatural worlds to bring messages from the living to the departed. In this one, he’s hired by himself to destroy himself—or rather, by a duplicate created by Jack who has avoided dissolution, and now wants to dispose of Jack in order to take his place. Since the unbreakable geass under which Jack operates forces him to take the commission of anyone who brings him his business card, he’s forced to take on the mission of doing away with himself, and most of the story is involved with his elaborate efforts to figure a way out of the dilemma, a problem that looks unsolvable through most of the text. The best thing about the Jack Shade stories is Pollack’s invented mythology, which is rich and lush and strange, and which is superimposed fascinatingly on the everyday mundane details of life in modern-day Manhattan, the supernatural and the familiar worlds wrapped intricately around each other like something from an Escher print. A similar offbeat and unusual mystical system, with elaborate magical rules, features in Tamsyn Muir’s “The Deepwater Bride,” about a young girl from a family with a long tradition of being chroniclers of supernatural events observing the start of something very like a Lovecraftian Incursion (Muir’s mythology is not quite that of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, although there are obvious points of similarity) that threatens to obliterate a small town. Of course, against her own better judgment and her family’s long tradition of non-interference, she ends up trying to intervene, with unexpected results.

Nothing else in July/August rises to quite this level of quality, although there is some other good stuff. New writer Betsy James gives us an unusual Afterlife fantasy in “Paradise and Trout,” about a young boy who finds that he loves the material world around him so much, even after death, that he’s reluctant to leave it for the austere afterlife of his ancestors, and Matthew Hughes gives us another entertaining Vancian swords & sorcery adventure in “The Curse of the Myrmelon,” set in the world of Raffalon the Thief, although Raffalon himself plays only a supporting role in this one.

The rest of the stories in the issue are science fiction, and, as is usually the case in F&SF, are somewhat weaker than the fantasy stories. The best of them is probably Richard Chwedyk’s “Dixon’s Road,” about an old lover who returns to visit the home of a world-famous poet, now turned into a museum/shrine, long after he left her and long after her death—the emotional content here is expertly handled, but the problem is that it could easily have been told as a mainstream story with only a very few changes, as the fantastic element, that the lover had been away on a long voyage through space, is hardly necessary to produce the same scenario. Chwedyk also makes the mistake of quoting some of the poetry of the universally respected, world-famous poet, usually not a good idea unless the author himself happens to be a world-class poet, which Chwedyk is not. Oliver Buckram’s “The Quintessence of Dust” reminds me strongly of some of the stories that Brian W. Aldiss used to write back in the early ‘60s, about futures where humans have died off but their robot servants continue on, assuming the roles of their absent masters. Gregor Hartmann’s “Into the Fiery Planet” is a satirical look, reminiscent in some ways of some of the stuff Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth used to write, about a PR man whose job it is to come up with a reason to convince galactic bureaucrats not to abandon the colony on the unpleasant volcanic hellhole of a world that he lives on. James Patrick Kelly’s “Oneness: A Triptych” is rather minor Kelly, a clever finger exercise about the bizarre mating customs of the galaxy, more ingenious than involving. Naomi Kritzer’s “The Silicon Curtain: A Seastead Story” is another installment in her long-running de facto novel serialization. Van Aaron Hughes’s “The Body Pirate” sets up an extremely unlikely system where people can separate their souls into the bodies of birds, and also into multiple human bodies; the text here is meant to be fragmented, but in the issue I have, sloppy proofreading seems to have scrambled some sections of text unintentionally, which didn’t make it any easier to read.

It is, of course, far too early to begin seriously evaluating C.C. Finlay’s tenure as F&SF editor. Magazines have big inventories, which makes it impossible to tell which stories were bought by Finlay and which were bought by former editor Gordon Van Gelder. About all that can be said is that the number of SF stories per issue has gone up in the issues that Finlay has edited—but that their quality has remained uneven, with the fantasy stories in the issue usually stronger than the SF stories. Lack of strong science fiction has been a weakness of F&SF’s for several years now, and I hope that Finlay can turn this around down the line.

The August Asimov’s has some good stories in it, although most of them are rather melancholy—in fact, the best word to describe the overall mood of the stories in this issue would probably be “regret.” Strongest story here is probably Paul McAuley’s “Wild Honey,” set in a future America that has undergone a partial apocalypse of some kind, probably driven by climate change, which has reduced civilization to small-town enclaves menaced by Mad Max-like outlaw gangs. One old woman struggles to keep technology alive with the aid of genetically manipulated hives of bees, but the tide is against her; the bee technology here is fascinating, and totally plausible (McAuley was a biologist before he became a writer, after all). The old woman regrets the state that society has fallen to, but not her own life choices; the young woman she attempts to adopt as her apprentice doesn’t know enough yet to regret her decisions, but will probably come to regret them somewhere down the line. Also good, and probably the least melancholy story in the issue, is Karl Bunker’s “Caisson,” for the most part a very well-detailed and accurate historical about a penniless immigrant struggling to cope with the dangers of a job building the Brooklyn Bridge, in a caisson deep under the East River. There is ultimately a fantastic element here, although it comes close to being a subliminal one; the fantastic element is never shown on the page, but it’s left to the reader to figure out what it must be from clues embedded in the text. “Caisson” is the only story in the issue where the characters are left happier and better-off by the end of the story than they were at the beginning, although there is a strong element of regret for one character’s loss of a child that motivates his actions throughout. Also engrossing, although drenched with regret for lost opportunities and wasted lives from beginning to end, is Nick Wolven’s “No Placeholder For You, My Love,” about two people meeting, then losing each other, then finding each other again, then struggling against the odds to hold on to each other while trapped in an illusionary world (either afterlife or Virtual Reality surround, or perhaps a little of both; it’s left a bit in the air) of constant lavish parties and celebrations of all sorts, parties that they have both grown weary of long before. Old-timers like me may be reminded of an old movie called Between Two Worlds, although, unlike in the movie, there’s no last-minute reprieve to rescue the protagonists from their fate.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “The First Step” is also awash in regret, the protagonist’s regret over missed chances and neglected moments of his life driving him to time-travel not to change things, but just to catch a glimpse of what he’s missed. There’s also plenty to regret in Will McIntosh’s novella “A Thousand Nights Till Morning,” which starts out with its protagonists in such desperate straits, stranded in a tiny Mars colony after an alien race has conquered Earth and destroyed human civilization, that their only viable option is to crash an asteroid into Earth (how they do this is never quite explained) and kill off almost all life there, including most of the aliens. The plausibility of the science strikes me as dubious in several places here (such as building a new spaceship out of scraps found in the ruins of Chicago after their original one is destroyed during a rescue mission to Earth), but it’s fast-paced and exciting, and carries the interesting twist that the humans must somehow compel one of the surviving aliens to help them in order to save the human race from extinction; the protagonist is also unusual for this sort of story, being so anxious and full of fears and doubts of his own worth that he’s paralyzed with indecision most of the time and tends to shit his pants at times of high stress, hardly the usual hero of a Military SF story. Regret and a hopeless longing for things to be different and better than they are also subsumes Kelly Robson’s “Two-Year Man,” which goes beyond melancholy to downright sad.

Another candidate for the title of Best Collection of the Year, in a year that’s turning out to be a very strong one for short-story collections, is The Best of Nancy Kress, a huge (almost 600 page) volume that’s pricey at $45.00, but worth it for the extensive amount of really first-class fiction you get here, including several Nebula and Hugo Award winners. Almost all of the stories here are core science fiction, and much of it rigorous Hard Science Fiction at that, with the emphasis on the impact of biological science on human society—although the strongest element of any Kress story is the complexity and vividness of the characterization. Just about everything here is first-rate, but if I had to pick favorites, I’d say that the best stories include “Dancing on Air,” “Pathways,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” and “Margin of Error.” Kress does some of her best work at novella length, and even in a book of this length there’s not room to include all the good novellas she’s written, but the collection does contain some of her best ones, including “And Wild For to Hold,” “Trinity,” “Shiva in Shadow,” and, perhaps her most famous story, “Beggars in Spain.”