86

Twelve Tomorrows, ed. by Bruce Sterling. (Technology Review, 978-0-9910444-3-6, $14.95, 229 pages.) Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

Asimov’s, October/November.

F&SF, October/November.

 

Twelve Tomorrows is the fourth volume in a series of annual original SF anthologies in magazine form published by the people who also produce MIT’s Technology Review magazine, this issue, like last year’s volume, edited by Bruce Sterling. Like the first three volumes, most of the eleven stories (oddly, there are eleven, in spite of the title) in Twelve Tomorrows are near-future stories that deal with the possibilities (and threats) of emerging technologies, most set within the next ten or twenty years—although there is one Alternate History story that takes place in the distant past rather than the near future, and one that takes place in a more distant future. Overall, I found this volume somewhat disappointing, although there are a few strong stories. As was mostly true of last year’s volume as well, there’s a high didactic quotient to many of the stories, with lots of infodumps and characters explaining things to each other that they should already know; some of the stories eschew traditional narrative altogether and others are a bit static, lacking in drama and a compelling human story to make them involving as fiction. The future depicted in many of the stories seems a bit stale as well, as if they’re describing the present we already live in—social media used for clandestine social manipulation, drones, the Constant Intensive Surveillance Society, fecal transplants, data mining—rather than the future; the volume might have been more compelling if the authors had been able to up the Imagination Ante a bit.

The two best stories, by a good margin, are “Consolation,” by John Kessel and “It Takes More Than Muscles To Frown,” by Ned Beauman. The Kessel is a fascinating, multi-layered look at an impoverished, Balkanizing future America where the Northeasten and Pacific states have been absorbed by Canada, centering around the unlikely romance between a political activist who allows herself to be talked into becoming a reluctant terrorist and a non-political would-be immortal obsessed with life-extension. The Beauman is a vigorous and violent postcyberpunk tale, whose straightforward plot and headlong action is a relief after a few of the more static stories; there’s not much in the background setting of corporate intrigue and warfare that you couldn’t get from watching a spy movie or a television cop show, but the expression-altering prosthetic technology being used is inventive, and the story does a good job of working out its applications, advantages, and drawbacks. Annalee Newitz’s “All-Natural Organic Microbes” is also told in a straightforward, even jazzy, manner, and is enjoyable up to the point where it simply stops rather than resolving anything (and fecal transplants exist now, so it’s hard to see how they can be legitimized as an innovative future technology). Bruce Sterling’s own “The Ancient Engineer” is one of the more enjoyable stories here, but seems oddly out-of-place in a futurology-oriented anthology called Twelve Tomorrows, being an Alternate History set in the later days of the Roman Empire. It centers around a provincial official who comes into possession of an astronomical calculator, a variant of the Antikythera Mechanism fished up from a shipwreck in our own timeline; you’d think that possession of such a device would be the seed-point from which an alternate technology would evolve, but, oddly, all of the technology shown, bridges, aqueducts, water-powered iron forges, actually existed in the real Roman Empire, and even the Celestial Mechanism itself doesn’t play an important role in either changing technology or in the resolution of the story itself. (One minor point, that could probably be covered by this being an Alternate History, but would a Roman official really refer to his provincial Governor as “sire?”)

Twelve Tomorrows also features an extensive portfolio of artwork by Virgil Finlay, one of the great illustrators of the Pulp Era.

This may not be available in bookstores, so if you want it, you’ll probably have to mail-order it, either from www.technologyreview.com/sf or from Technology Review, Inc., One Main Street, 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142.

The October/November issue of Asimov’s is a strong one, perhaps the strongest issue of the year to date. Much of that strength is due to the presence in its pages of Aliette de Bodard’s complex and powerful novella, “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls,” another in her long series of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far-future of an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires. This one deals with an empire on the verge of being invaded by another empire, and the search for a fabled lost space-station where superweapons that might tip the balance were said to have been developed—but most of the Xuya stories are at their core about Family, and “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” is no exception, centering around an intricate web of dysfunctional family relationships that stretches across generations, and includes family members who have been transformed into immensely powerful living spaceships, and the “ghosts” of long-dead family members who still interact (and squabble) with the living through memory implants that preserved their personalities and experience as past rulers (which experience they’re willing to share with present-day rulers, whether the present-day rulers want it or not). Add time-travel, a skein of plots, counter-plots, and betrayals, and spooky interaction with weird dimensions beyond the space we know, and you end up with a hugely entertaining story that certainly will turn out to be one of the best SF novellas of the year.

Nothing else in the issue quite lives up to the de Bodard, but there is some other good stuff here as well. Ian McDowell spins an entertaining Weird Western in “The Hard Woman,” featuring a woman who can harden her skin at will, making her invulnerable to bullets and knife-thrusts; McDowell does a good job here of logically working out the liabilities and limitations as well as the advantages such a condition would bestow, and showing the ways in which even an “invulnerable” woman would be vulnerable to attack. Rick Wilber tells an autumnal story about an elderly couple experiencing time-slips that make them momentarily young again during their last road trip together in “Walking to Boston,” a road trip that, as one of them knows and the other doesn’t, ends with long-held debts that must be paid no matter the cost. Another road trip features in “English Wildlife,” by Alan Smale, who takes us along with a dysfunctional couple touring England by car who become obsessed with the legend of the Green Man—a quiet horror story, well-told but with a familiar plot, although the author does manage to ring in a few unexpected surprises before the end. Daryl Gregory’s “Begone,” a reprint from the audio anthology Rip-Off! I edited a couple of years back, shows the dilemma of a sitcom character who finds himself replaced when someone else assumes the same role.

The issue’s short stories are pleasant but minor: Sandra McDonald’s “The Adjunct Professor’s Guide to Life After Death” deals with ghosts trapped in a school, Ian Creasey’s “My Time on Earth” shows a tourist to Earth negotiating with a ghost (or what she thinks is a ghost, anyway), Brooks Peck’s “With Folded RAM” depicts space-station dwellers struggling to escape the “benign” tyranny of the station’s AI, and Timons Esaias’s “Hollywood After 10” takes time-tourists back to the McCarthy hearings that tried to sniff out supposed Communists in the Hollywood film industry.

The strongest story in the November/December F&SF, another of the year’s best novellas, probably the strongest SF story F&SF has published all year, and one of the hardest Hard SF stories the magazine has published in a long time, is Carter Scholz’s novella “Gypsy.” This is the nail-bitingly tense story of the race to clandestinely launch a colony ship to Alpha Centauri before an obviously imminent global war destroys civilization and perhaps even wipes out the human race. Most of the story concerns itself with the decades-long flight itself, narrated by a succession of caretakers awakened from hibernation to deal with one crisis or another that has arisen, and their heroic, sometimes fatal, efforts to keep the colony ship, Gypsy, on course to its destination, carrying what is perhaps the last hope for humanity’s survival. The scientific problems the crew faces are ingenious and comprehensively and painstakingly worked out in convincing detail, but, as with the de Bodard novella, the soul of the story is in the people who inhabit it, sharply drawn and psychologically complex characters whose lives and interactions feel very real—and their story is heartbreaking. Look for this one, and probably the de Bodard, to feature prominently on next year’s award ballots.

As with the October/November Asimov’s, after the lead novella, nothing else in the November/December F&SF is as strong, but there are still some good stories. Robert Reed gives us an odd situation in “The City of Your Soul,” in which only the passengers aboard a certain airplane flight remember a weird disaster happening while they were in the air, with a whole South American city suddenly and mysteriously disappearing...but by the time they land, nobody else on Earth seems to remember it happening, and no record of such an event can be found, and the passengers are left trying to come to terms with this disconnect between their memories and everybody else’s. As no firm explanation for just what happened and why it happened is ever put forth, I suppose this must be considered to be a fantasy rather than SF, but it’s a moody and mysterious one, well worth reading. In “Cleanout,” Naomi Kritzer tells what seems at first to be a straight mainstream story about a somewhat dysfunctional family gathering after the death of the family matriarch to deal with cleaning out her crowded house, which they proceed to do, puzzling over various odd items that they come across in the process. Nothing specific happens on the surface, but there’s an almost subliminal fantastic element below the surface here, with hints that, unbeknownst to the children, their parents might have been aliens, or perhaps refugees from an Alternate World—a possibility that the protagonist gradually comes to recognize, but which the story ends without definitely resolving, so whether you read it as a mainstream story or a stealth SF story is left pretty much up to you. In “Hob’s Choice,” Tim Sullivan offers a well-told offworld adventure that depends a little too much on being the sequel to a story published in 2013. Bruce McAllister explores somewhat familiar territory in “Dreampet,” another of several stories in the last couple of years warning against the moral pitfalls involved in the practice of producing genetically-altered pets or toys. And Jeffrey Ford’s “The Winter Wraith” is a quiet horror story with a seasonal Christmas twist, appropriate, I guess, for the December issue.