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Asimov’s, December.

Clarkesworld, August.

Clarkesworld, September.

Clarkesworld, October.

Clarkesworld, November.

Clarkesworld, December.

Mission: Tomorrow, ed. by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. (Baen, 978-1-47678-094-8, $15.00, 336 pages.) Cover art by Stephan Martiniere.

Operation Arcana, ed. by John Joseph Adams. (Baen, 978-1476780368, 320 pages.) Cover art by Dominic Harman.

Pwing Tomorrow: Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier, ed. by The Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 978-0-9966686-1-3).

 

Asimov’s heads out of 2015 with one of its strongest issues of the year, its December issue. The lead story here, “The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred,” by Greg Egan, can be thanked for much of the issue’s strength, being certainly one of the best novellas of the year; reprint rights were encumbered by an upcoming appearance as a novella chapbook, but I can assure you from insider knowledge that it would otherwise have been reprinted in most of the year’s Best of the Year collections. Here Egan takes us to a society on the asteroid Vesta that is being torn apart by racially based discrimination and systematic oppression generated by a regime that has singled out a minority as no longer being welcomed as full citizens of the polity, bringing about what amounts to a civil war, with refugees fleeing arrest and prosecution willing to risk the incredibly dangerous chance of stowing aboard rocks being slingshoted to the outer Solar System in order to seek refuge with the more-progressive asteroid-city of Ceres. This creates a major problem for the Port Director of Ceres, who finds herself dealing with a constant stream of stowaway refugees—a problem that becomes critical when Vesta sends a warship to overtake them before they can reach Ceres, and leads to a fatal situation where there is no easy answer, and she must choose who’s to live and who’s to die. I suspect that Australia’s ongoing refugee crisis, which this Australian author has written about before, was the original inspiration for this story, but it hit newsstands here at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, which lends this deeply moral and ethically questioning story an even-greater and more sobering impact, as how to deal with (and treat) refugees is clearly going to be an increasing part of the problems we’re going to have to deal with as the 21st Century progresses and war and catastrophic climate change shakes them loose by the millions. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this novella turn up on next year’s Hugo and Nebula ballots.

Also first-rate in the December Asimov’s is “Of Apricots and Dying,” by Amanda Forrest, a sad and heart-wrenching study of a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family in a future Pakistan, who must ultimately face the choice of leaving to carve out a new future for herself elsewhere or staying and providing an ever-more-needed support system for her faltering family, at the cost of any kind of satisfying life for herself—another mature and thoughtful work where there are no easy answers, and perhaps not even any good answers at all. Robert Reed continues the sub-theme here of refugees—or at least of people deciding whether or not to flee the life-situation they find themselves in—in “Empty,” in which a group of AIs flee to the Oort Cloud to seek refugee from another group of AIs, in a future in which all the humans have already been exterminated. M. Bennardo takes us along on a desperate rescue mission to a dying space station in “We Jump Down into the Dark”; the story is a suspenseful one, with a personal stake involved for the protagonist, who’s anxious to save his ex-lover, who is aboard the disintegrating station, but an odd feature of it is that although the protagonist rushes to the rescue, he doesn’t really do anything of significance once he gets there; his ex-lover more-or-less rescues herself, and everything would have played out pretty much the same whether he was there or not. In “Bidding War,” Rich Larson takes us to an extensively-wired and faintly unpleasant future for the story of a man trying to buy the replica of a prehistoric flute in an online auction as part of an unlikely plan to win back the affections of a woman who’s just broken up with him; this is a broadly satiric tale, and I’m sure that the protagonist has been deliberately crafted as a shallow and superficial little prick whom you are not supposed to like—but because he’s a shallow and superficial little prick, you don’t much care what happens to him, either.

The electronic magazine Clarkesworld also ends 2015 on a high note, going out with several powerful stories scattered over the last few issues of the year. The best story in the August Clarkesworld was “Today I Am Paul,” by Martin L. Shoemaker, a poignant look at the robotic caretakers who will be gently shepherding us to death in the near future; the issue also features Emily Devenport’s “The Servant,” about a class-war between Executives and “worms” building on an immense generation ship. The September Clarkesworld was somewhat weaker, but did feature good work such as “Cremulator,” by Robert Reed, about an inexplicable (and unexplained) grisly global phenomenon, and “The Algebra of Events,” by Elizabeth Bourne, a story with a Twilight Zone twist about the crew of a spaceship struggling to survive on a hostile planet after their Probability Engine breaks down. The October Clarkesworld features one of the year’s best stories, “Ice,” by Rich Larson. This one has something of a YA feel, but don’t be mistaken, it carries a sting in its tail, introducing us to young brothers who live in a dysfunctional family on a hostile alien world, and whose clandestine expedition to witness an alien wonder just may, if they’re not lucky, turn out to be the last thing they ever do. October also features a translation from the Chinese, “Summer At Grandma’s House,” by Hao Jingfang, about a man who finds out that what goes on in Grandma’s house is nothing like what he initially assumed that it would be, and neither is Grandma. The strong November Clarkesworld, one of the strongest issues of the year, features a quirky and ultimately quite moving story by Naomi Kritzer, “So Much Cooking,” which follows a sprightly “Cooking Blog,” complete with recipes, as a deadly worldwide pandemic begins to take hold; the unfolding catastrophe can mostly be inferred between the lines as the situation in the cook’s household slowly grows worse and worse and more and more extreme substitutions in the recipes need to be called for, but the impressive thing about the story is how the blogger manages to stay chatty and upbeat in a believable manner even in the face of personal tragedy, steadfastly refusing to despair or give up. Also very good in November is “In the Queue for the Worldship Munawwer,” by Sara Saab, a harrowing look at an attempt to evacuate as much of the population of Lebanon into the Worldship Munawwer as possible before an immense asteroid destroys the Earth; each of the world’s countries has been assigned a Worldship, that can evacuate only 900.000 people apiece (or, as the protagonist puts it, “two out of every five” citizens), and the considerations that arise as to who should be left behind are heartbreaking. There’s also a story, translated from the Chinese about a secret society dedicated to the work of a dead poet, “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” by Xia Jia. The December Clarkesworld is a bit weaker, but does feature a very strange story by Tamsyn Muir, “Union,” about a shipment of wives (or perhaps “wives,” since they’re clearly of artificial origin) who are shipped to the good crofters of Franckton in some unspecified location (a colony settlement on an alien world? the far future? an alternate reality? Nothing is really explained) as payment on a trade settlement, and the civil unrest that arises as the crofters become convinced they’ve been cheated and had inferior goods palmed off on them; a very odd piece, but strangely compelling. There’s also a fast-paced bit of Military SF by Seth Dickinson, “Morrigan in Shadow,” about a warrior in a cataclysmic interstellar war who risks plunging into a singularity to deliver the decisive blow, at whatever cost to herself.

In the little space that we have left, let’s take a quick look at some of the anthologies that didn’t get covered earlier in the year.

With one possible exception, there’s nothing really exceptional in Mission: Tomorrow, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, but it’s a good solid core SF anthology, filled with solid work, and well-worth the cover price. The one standout story here is Michael F. Flynn’s “In Panic Town, On the Backward Moon,” which is great fun if not terribly profound, taking us to the brawling lawless frontier of the Solar System, to Mars and its Backward Moon, Phobos, for a robust and slyly amusing tale of lowlifes, lawmen, heists, con-jobs, double-dealing, double-crosses, and skullduggery. Mission: Tomorrow also features good work by Jack Skillingstead, Christopher McKitterick, Brenda Cooper, David D. Levine, Angus McIntyre, Robin Wayne Bailey, Jack McDevitt, and others.

Original fantasy anthologies were surprisingly light on the ground this year. The best of them (possibly the only one of them) was probably an anthology of “Military Fantasy” called Operation Arcana, edited by John Joseph Adams. The military story and the fantasy story seem like they might mix a bit uneasily, but, as the editor points out in his introduction, there’s a long tradition in fantasy literature of descriptions of wars and battles, from J.R.R. Tolkien to George R.R. Martin, and the mix works well enough here to produce some good work. The best stories are probably “The Way Home,” by Linda Nagata, “Bomber’s Moon,” by Simon R. Green, and “In Skeleton Leaves,” by Seanan McGuire, but there’s also good stuff by Carrie Vaughn, Glen Cook, Yoon Ha Lee, David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell, and others.

An odd addition to the year’s roster of anthologies, popping up practically at the last minute, was a reprint SF anthology which seems to be mostly available in various ebook and downloadable formats, for a range of voluntary donations, Pwing Tomorrow: Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier, edited by “the Electronic Frontier Foundation” (although Dave Maass is mentioned in an editorial capacity in the inside copy). This is a good solid collection of SF stories about the wired, intensively networked future that’s become one of the standard futures in SF in the last few years; most substantial stories here are probably “The Gambler,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, “Slippage,” by Lauren Beukes, “His Master’s Voice,” by Hannu Rajaniemi, and “Business As Usual,” by Pat Cadigan, but there are also strong reprint stories here by Cory Doctorow, Madeline Ashby, Neil Gaiman, James Patrick Kelly, Bruce Sterling, and others. If you want this, your best bet is probably to download it, for a range of voluntary donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation from https://supporters-eff.org/donate/pwningtomorrow.