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F&SF, September/October.

Asimov’s, September.

Interzone 259.

 

A somewhat lackluster September/October F&SF overall, nothing really bad but little really exciting either, with the exception of a few strong stories, sprinkled throughout the issue like raisins in rice pudding. Best story here is probably “The Bone War,” by Elizabeth Bear, in which her series character, the Wizard Bijou the Artificer from her Eternal Sky series, gets hired by a museum to piece together and ultimately animate by her magic the recently discovered fossil bones of a monstrous creature, and ends up in the middle of a scholarly “war” between fiercely competing scholars with different ideas of what the creature must look like. The story is stylish and elegant, with lots of sly touches that some readers might recognize as echoes from the “Bone War” between 19th Century paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othneil Charles Marsh that took place in our own reality. Bear brings it all to an amusing and satisfactory conclusion; the only false step here, in my opinion, is her use of the term “dinosaur” for the creature being assembled, a term which strikes me as anachronistic and jarring in the context of this fantasy world, as if it leaked in from our own timeline. Also strong here is “The Lord of Ragnarök,” by Albert E. Cowdrey, a historical fantasy novella taking place in 12th Century France, detailing a peasant’s long, arduous, and very dangerous social rise from apprentice to knighthood to, eventually, the nobility and the husband of a Queen. The peasant is a ruthless, resourceful, clear-headed, and relentlessly logical character, always ready at a moment’s notice to take advantage of rapidly changing situations and strokes of fortune, and not above doing some pretty dark things to survive and prosper, and so makes an interesting if not terribly likeable or admirable protagonist. The fantasy element here is actually somewhat weak, and the story might have worked better as a straight historical—except that then, of course, he wouldn’t have been able to sell it anywhere. The novella is mostly narrated through the eyes of its peasant protagonist, although there are odd, and somewhat jarring, moments when the author speaks to us in an omniscient mode, mentioning anachronistic things that the protagonist couldn’t possibly know about.

Also good here are “A Hot Day’s Night,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, a harsh slice-of-life story set in a grim and all-too-likely future Phoenix where the water has finally and irrevocably run out, causing the inhabitants to scrabble for survival any way they can. David Gerrold’s “Monsieur,” apparently postulated as the opening section of a novel that Gerrold is planning to write, gives us an interesting and logical modern take on vampire lore—nothing that I haven’t seen before here or there, in the vast body of vampire stories, but well-reasoned and well laid-out, with both the character of “Monsieur” and the character relating his story of how he himself became a vampire to the story’s narrator psychologically complex and intriguing. Gerrold does a good job of bringing the story to a satisfactory conclusion while leaving the door open for more, and I’d be interested in reading the novel that eventually develops. (Apropos of nothing, in forty years of doing writer’s workshops, I myself have met every one of the characters Gerrold describes in the opening Writer’s Workshop section.)

The rest of the stuff in the issue is weaker. New writer Bo Balder’s “A House of Her Own” starts out as a story about a pleasant pastoral society who grow (or perhaps are grown by) living organic houses that grow larger with their owners as the owners age, eventually providing shelter and nourishment for them, but then what amounts to the storyline for Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” crashes into the story and takes it over as a spaceship full of judgmental, imperialistic, arrogantly meddling Terrans arrive and try to change everything about the society, and the story can’t quite stand up under the weight of that. Nick Wolven’s “We’re So Very Sorry for Your Recent Tragic Loss,” is a satirical piece about a woman in a wired and intensively networked future society whose life is gradually ruined by false information about her supposed “recent tragic loss” that seeps into every aspect of her existence, causing everything, including robots and inanimate objects, to constantly and relentlessly offer her condolences; the story reminds me strongly of a once well-known story from the ‘60s, Gordon R. Dickson’s “Computers Don’t Argue,” that the author very probably has never even heard of. Marissa Lingen’s “Ten Stamps Viewed Under Water” is an overly long and drawn-out story about a community besieged by plague in a vaguely described medieval fantasy world, one where the details of the society aren’t really consistent or logical (they’re quarantined for the plague, but the mail is still being delivered?).

Much the same could be said about the September Asimov’s—nothing really bad here, but, with the exception of a couple of stronger stories, nothing that really rises all that much above average either. The best story here is new writer Sam J. Miller’s emotionally grueling “Calved,” the story of a man struggling to find work and stay alive in a ruthless society made up of refugees fleeing cities drowned by rising oceans in an all-too-likely climate-change ravaged future, and struggling too to somehow stay in touch with his son, whom he can feel becoming slowly estranged from him and slipping further and further away every time he leaves for a six-month long job carving ice from melting glaciers. The father’s hopeless and ultimately misguided attempts to win his son’s affection back are heartwrenching, and go tragically wrong. I actually saw the twist ending here coming a few pages before it actually did, but it arrives with the slow inexorableness of a Greek tragedy and strikes with brutal force. Grim stuff, but compelling; you can’t look away from the traffic accident unfolding before you, one which ruins the lives of everyone involved. Also good in September, although it won’t be to everyone’s taste, is “The God Year,” by Jim Grimsley. Grimsley popped up in the early Oughts with a handful of excellent stories, mostly in Asimov’s, then fell silent, so it’s good to see him back again with this cruel but slyly humorous tale of how the biter is bit when a god selects a squalid rural village in a medieval-like society as the place to Dwell for a year—the question is, which of the hundreds of gods available are they going to get, a benign one, who’ll spread peace and prosperity, or a malign one who’ll spread ruin and pain? This is ostensibly a fantasy, but a few almost subliminal clues lead me to believe that it’s actually a stealth SF story instead, science fiction disguised as fantasy.

“The Molenstraat Music Festival,” by Sean Monaghan, is a quiet, low-key character study about a once-famous musician, now crippled and living in retirement on a sparsely inhabited planet, who reluctantly takes on the job of mentoring a prodigally talented but brain-damaged young musician in order to prepare her to participate in the above-mentioned Molenstraat Music Festival. This is a pleasant story to read, with likeable characters, but the science fiction element is very thin; without the brain-repairing implants, it could easily be (and I think has been) told as a straight mainstream story taking place on present-day Earth, with very few real changes required. “The Biology at the End of the World,” by Brenda Cooper, is supposed to face its young protagonist with a hard choice, to suppress illegal biotechnology engineering as is her sworn duty as a novice member of The Bureau of Diversity Protection, protecting the biosphere against the biohacking that had done much damage in the past, or let the technology be used to repair the damage that has already been done to the already severely damaged ecosystem of Earth—something it looks like it might have a very good chance of being able to do. Unfortunately, the deck is stacked so thoroughly here on one side over the other, and it becomes so clear to the reader what the only reasonable choice is, that there’s really not much actual suspense as to what course of action she’s going to pick. Vylar Kaftan gives us a tale of First Contact set in the Arctic, “Last Hunt,” which is more or less what the story of ET might have been like if he’d met tribal hunters on the ice instead of a little white boy in a suburban tract home; not many surprises here, although the story gains interest by being a familiar scenario told through the eyes of an apprentice shaman completely unfamiliar with the concepts of aliens, spaceships, or life on other planets. In “Duller’s Peace,” Jason Sanford takes us to a nightmarish but fortunately not terribly likely (I hope) dystopia where Thought Police watch everyone’s thoughts every moment of the day and haul you away or kill you if you think the wrong thing. And in “Searching for Commander Parsec,” Peter Wood gives us the story of a troubled young boy tuning in to radio shows that shouldn’t exist on his radio, a story that reminds me strongly of Harlan Ellison’s “Jeffty Is Five,” although it’s considerably less effective.

The strongest story in an uneven Interzone 259 is undoubtedly Rich Larson’s “Edited.” Larson has been developing interestingly in the last couple of years, with a number of good stories published, and is an author worth keeping an eye on. This one shows us in a poignant way what it’s like to realize that you’re not important enough to make the cut when someone reorganizes the priorities of their life, no matter how central to it you thought you were (and also a reaffirmation that social class always trumps everything else, no matter what); a quiet but compellingly emotional story here, effectively handled. Also good here is Chris Butler’s “The Deep of Winter,” which provides an Origin Story for the race of people who emit spores that enable them to read each other’s emotions, a race featured in several recent Butler stories, and who turn out to have been given this odd ability as part of a scientific experiment. This pleases me, and I find I can accept the Spore People and their society better now that the whole thing turns out to be deliberately and artificially created, as I was never quite able to believe in how such a system could have evolved naturally—how could early tribesmen have hunted game if they’re emitting spores during the hunt that would tip the prey off as to just what their intentions were? Mack Leonard’s “Midnight Funk Association,” this year’s James White Award winner, is written in a jazzier style than typically found in Interzone, has an interesting and atypical protagonist, a black musician who’s involved in a complex dysfunctional relationship with a minion known only as “the white boy,” and makes for an absorbing read. The only problem I have with it is that it’s never explained why the Evil Corporation is spending all this money and going to all this effort to disrupt the “Detroit Sound” and cause local musicians to lose their funk, except maybe they’re doing it just because they’re Evil.